Shortly before the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in China, the United States and the People's Republic of China both opened their new embassy complexes based on reciprocal agreements in Beijing and Washington, DC. Starting with the publicly uttered statements on the importance of the embassy buildings by both states, the study analyzes the two embassy projects as instruments of a self-staging in the respective capital as well as a means of expressing political ambitions in the politically, militarily, and economically most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century.