by Kim Ghattas
Although the United States had regularly acted outside the multilateral institutions it had helped set up after World War II, especially in cases of national security imperatives, America mostly behaved like a convening power. But there were more and more countries to convene and more coordination was needed outside the big traditional institutions. From day one, Hillary’s State Department began formalizing connections with countries big and small, starting with Asia, ASEAN, and the TAC. Over the course of Hillary’s tenure, the department would set up twenty-five formal initiatives that would place the United States at the heart of a web of diplomacy and encourage others to feel involved in managing the planet. There were bilateral strategic dialogues with India and South Africa, in addition to the already existing one with China; smaller countries like Indonesia and Nigeria got bilateral commissions. There were global programs of all sorts: entrepreneurship, civil society, maternal health, climate change, counterterrorism efforts. Many initiatives relied on a key partner, from Turkey to Norway, from nongovernmental organizations to businesses—stakeholders in a new system. Every day, the State Department worked to connect with countries, players, and people everywhere. Even in the midst of the Iran debacle with Turkey and Brazil, the State Department was announcing a “conference for the U.S.-Brazil joint action plan to eliminate racial and ethnic discrimination and promote equality” in Atlanta a few days later. Diplomacy was no longer just about formal talks with leaders. Smart power was exhausting but, in Clinton’s view, essential.
She was working hard to project an image of continued American dominance by engaging the world relentlessly, feeding the perception that America still mattered on every level and hoping to turn it into a reality. But though technology had shrunk the world to the size of a village, Hillary quickly learned that her counterparts still wanted to look her in the eyes to make sure they still mattered to Washington or to seal a deal. It was still essential to show up—everywhere.
9
MEET ME AT THE FAIR
Shanghai was drenched by a steady spring drizzle that beat down on the metropolis of futuristic skyscrapers, sending ripples into the gray waters of the Huangpu River. When Hillary last visited China’s financial capital, in November 2009, it had rained too, and she had had to hold on to her dark-blue umbrella with two hands, in the wind, before a shell of a building. She had sounded like a coach, rallying her team around a flagging project: America’s pavilion at the world expo to be attended by 189 countries. Now, in May 2010, she had come to see the result of her work and make sure with her own eyes that it had really been built. She stepped out of her car and under a red, white, and blue umbrella printed with the words “Shanghai Expo.” Two mammoth gray ovaloid steel structures stood in front of her, connected in the middle by a low-slung glass structure. The architect had intended the design to suggest an eagle stretching its wings in welcome. Instead it looked like a bunker, drab, foreboding, and cold, more like the fortresses that housed American embassies in hostile parts of the world. At least it was there.
World fairs began in the nineteenth century to showcase industrial and technological innovations and to introduce faraway countries to one another. Over the years, fairs had become more and more about nation branding, a way to improve a country’s image. For China, the Shanghai World Expo was another opportunity, almost as important as the Beijing Olympics of 2008, to prove that the Middle Kingdom was opening up and rising onto the world stage as a peaceful power. The Chinese Communist party also wanted to show off its economic prowess when the rest of the world was mired in recession. Beijing was spending $45 billion just sprucing up Shanghai ahead of the fair, and more than $200 million on the Chinese pavilion alone. Each exhibitor hoped that the millions of Chinese expected at the fair would be inspired to visit their country on holiday, buy some of their goods, strike a business deal in the pavilions’ VIP rooms—anything to get those Chinese yuans flowing into flagging economies. It was a costly sales pitch, but countries hoped for good returns on their investment. America had almost missed the party.
In the early 1990s, American lawmakers decided that taxpayer money could no longer be spent on international fairs. They just didn’t see the point; they were willing to make some exceptions but not many. It became mostly up to private investors to fund America’s participation in world expos. When Clinton had arrived at the State Department in early 2009, the plans to take part in the 2010 Shanghai Expo were in disarray. America felt like it was in economic meltdown during the financial crisis of 2008. There was no point asking Congress for an exception to use government funds, and no company could be convinced to spend money on what looked like a nonessential junket in a distant country.
But America’s absence would only reinforce all the talk about decline, like a once well-off family refusing to spring for a daughter’s wedding. The family’s limited funds might be better spent elsewhere, but nothing signals a drop in status as dramatically as slashing back the pomp. People would gossip. Every day the empty plot allocated for the USA pavilion would scream at millions of expo visitors: the United States is missing in action. Even Beijing didn’t really want such a message proclaimed so loudly: though the Chinese viewed the United States as weakened by the financial crisis, they still wanted their party to be complete, and the United States’ absence would reflect poorly on Beijing.
When Clinton traveled to China on her maiden voyage as secretary of state in February 2009, Dai Bingguo, the state councilor, and the foreign minister Yang Jiechi had asked her to ensure that the United States would attend the fair. Something had to be done. In 149 years of world expos, the United States had absented itself only once before, in Hannover in 2000, for very different reasons. The 1990s had been a golden decade for the United States: America was rich and felt like it ruled the world. The Clinton administration didn’t need to advertise the United States around the world; Bill, the president, had even turned down an invitation to visit the fair while he was in Germany that year.
Times had clearly changed. Though Hillary herself didn’t believe in the so-called American decline, she was intent on fighting that perception. She gave her Rolodex to two longtime Clinton fund-raisers, and they started working the phones to collect the $60 million needed to build the pavilion. Finally, there it stood, with big red letters on its side spelling out “USA” and thousands of Chinese queuing up to get inside. We filed past everybody and into the sixty-thousand-square-foot bunker.
We felt as though we had been transported into a typical American convention center. In a hangar-sized room, bright advertising displays from the corporate sponsors of the pavilion covered a white wall—FedEx, American Airlines, General Electric, Pepsi. A crowd of several hundred people stood on a maroon carpet, giggling and snapping pictures. The State Department had requested that the pavilion stay open to the public; Hillary wanted to remain accessible to visitors and to project a physical sense of informality and openness, reflecting the values that were key to her country. It was a powerful message in China, where repression and corruption meant that aloof politicians were always ringed by security. The crowd was almost all Chinese, their eyes trained on the two young Americans in jeans speaking to them from bullhorns.
These were the “student ambassadors,” two from a group of 160 college-age Americans, perfectly bilingual, not just linguistically but also culturally. The visitors were delighted to be greeted in their own language by smiling young Americans after they had waited in line in the heat, sometimes for three hours. It was public diplomacy par excellence, Hillary’s favorite kind.
“Ni hen lihai,” the students said and then translated, “You are awesome!”
The audience was transfixed. Some of the Chinese visitors, who were coming from all corners of the vast country, had never met a foreigner before, let alone heard one speak their language. As best as they could, they screamed back, “You are awesome!”
“Nong lau jie guen eh,” said the young girl, offering another translation of “You are awesome
.” Giggles erupted. A foreigner speaking Shanghai dialect! Then, led by the American students, in English, everybody screamed, “China. Is. Awesome!” The student ambassadors were constantly surrounded by a swarm of people. Everybody wanted a picture with them as though they were celebrities.
Suddenly, basketball legend Kobe Bryant from the Los Angeles Lakers appeared on the screens on the red wall on our left. “Ni hao,” he greeted the viewers in Chinese. Stunned silence. The video continued as ordinary Americans filmed on the streets of the United States were taught how to say “Welcome” in Mandarin. The Chinese giggled with laughter as the men and women tried, failed, and ultimately succeeded at uttering a few words in Mandarin. Famous skateboarder Tony Hawk did a stunt and then spoke into the camera in apparently fluent Chinese, possibly picked up during his trip to the country a few days earlier to inaugurate a Woodward skateboard camp in Beijing. Olympic medalist Michelle Kwan slid up to the camera on her skates, speaking Cantonese. A group of white, Latino, and Asian firefighters standing in front of their red truck; two dozen schoolchildren of mixed backgrounds in a park; a black shopkeeper; stockbrokers on the trading floor—all of these Americans offered their greetings to China. Wild applause.
In the next room, courtesy of Citicorp, a giant Hillary was projected on the wall.
“Ni hao,” she said, “I’m Hillary Clinton.” Warm applause from the crowd and excited “woo-hoos.”
“As you explore the pavilion, you will discover American values in action: diversity, innovation, and optimism,” Hillary said in the video. A film meant to be about the creative power of children followed, though the speakers were representatives from Chevron, GE, PepsiCo, and Johnson & Johnson. At the end of the video, Barack Obama appeared with his own message welcoming visitors to the pavilion. Some of the Chinese in the audience stood up from the benches, turned their backs to the screen, and handed their camera to someone to snap a picture of them with the American president in the background.
The pièce de résistance was a film screened in the “Pfizer Room.” A silent movie told the story of a young girl who wants to transform a junkyard into a garden. With a lot of cajoling, she convinces everybody in her neighborhood to help. The project is a communal success. To the delight of the audience, at some point during the film, the seats started shaking and a light mist was sprayed all over the room.
The traveling press kept rolling their eyes. The feel-good films with soaring tunes, sappy story lines, and big American flags fluttering on poles were just too much for seasoned reporters with a critical eye. The corporate stamp gave everything an unrefined, inelegant feel. There was no subtlety, no history, no talk of democracy, of the constitution, or of American traditions, nothing about American technology and innovation, nothing about tourist destinations. There was no mention of George Washington, no pictures of Mount Rushmore. There was nothing to see beyond the ubiquitous corporate logos and superficial entertainment.
Coverage in the United States was scathing. Writing in the Washington Post, Ezra Klein complained that “the inattention to aesthetics might work as a signal of power and wealth, like Bill Gates being rich enough to wear denim when he goes to meet the Queen. But then you get to the three videos that make up America’s message to the word. Message? We’re bad at languages, in hock to corporations, and only able to set up gardens when children shame us into doing so.” American officials on the delegation were also taken aback by the corporate-branding onslaught. This was a whole new way of contracting out U.S. diplomacy.
Yet the queue outside the American pavilion was the longest at the expo except for China’s own pavilion. Was it just the pull of the three big red letters on the facade? Were the Chinese leaving disappointed? Or did they experience something inside that Americans just weren’t getting? I was appalled too by what I saw as a crass sales pitch, but I wondered whether I’d been in America too long and had lost my outsider’s perspective.
The Chinese mostly smiled politely though some were no doubt disappointed by the lack of frills (the Saudi pavilion, for example, had an IMAX 3D movie theater that was a sensation). But the audience reaction to the American pavilion seemed mostly positive. A young couple said they were touched by “American humanity”; one man said he was impressed by how children had such heart. China was a country where the individual was subordinate to the Communist Party and children served their parents and society, and where despite the booming economy millions of citizens were poor and left behind. A film focused on children was a novelty; a little girl getting older people to gather around a project was unheard of in a country where civic activism had long been suppressed.
But I could see how the videos were also a small window into a normalcy that was out of reach for millions of Chinese and billions of others around the world. The roads looked safe, the streets were neat and lined with trees and grass; people looked friendly, and most importantly they seemed carefree. It was a film, of course: people in the United States weren’t all carefree; they toiled long hours, lacked health care, lost their jobs. But there was something in those films to envy. Trying to tap into whatever it was the Chinese might have been feeling, I thought back to my first visit to the United States in 1996. My sister Ingrid lived in San Francisco then, and we had gone for a walk around the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, a half hour drive across the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. A group of students was playing a ball game on the green grass on campus. Others lay around chatting, studying in the sun, their books scattered around them. Everything about these young students—their expressions, the way they reclined so easily in the sun, their postures—radiated a graceful ease. It was so peaceful it looked like a movie; but it was real, I could feel it. “So that’s what it feels like to be carefree,” I thought. For a fleeting moment I was painfully envious. I had never had that. Even affluent people in Lebanon with penthouse apartments overlooking the Mediterranean didn’t look carefree. Fear was a constant in our lives. Just as it was in the lives of people from Pakistan to China, places where the rule of law was a joke, baby milk was tainted, policemen dragged you out of your house in the middle of the night, and the greed of corrupt politicians left little behind for people to feed on. The Chinese government may have made economic success available to a vast number of its citizens, but life for the middle class was still precarious, too dependent on the whims of the powerful. The gap between rich and poor in China was also bigger than in most of the other big economies, and much of the country’s wealth was concentrated in the hands of families all connected to the ruling elite.
The image of America that the Chinese received inside the pavilion was not that of the country distrusted by proud nationalist Chinese, of the superpower that made unreasonable demands, encircled them in the Pacific, and lectured them from on high. This was the America where many Chinese dreamed of immigrating even as their own country boomed; it was the America that people thought of if they sought refuge in the U.S. embassy from persecution in their own country.
In the USA pavilion souvenir shop, everything seemed to be made in China. The Chinese manager asked Hillary to autograph her book Living History and then asked for a picture, handing her digital camera to a colleague behind the till. The two women smiled. The camera switched itself off. The manager grabbed it and fiddled with it. Hillary smiled. The camera was working again. The cashier tried to snap a picture. The screen went dark. The manager fiddled some more, determined to get her picture. “Why don’t I sign the book while you do that,” Hillary said, smiling. Finally, the digital screen captured a shot of the two women. There were cameras all around; a swarm of journalists always covered Hillary’s every move. It was hard to tell where her warmth and patience ended and where her acute self-awareness as a politician started.
By the main entrance, at the other end of the fairground, the Chinese pavilion, the size of one thousand soccer pitches, straddled both sides of the Huangpu River. The government had built the expo in a poor area of the city. Authoritie
s had evicted more than eighteen thousand families and some two hundred factories by force, clearing the area with wrecking balls. Government-led development in China was relentless and brutal, but you would never know it inside the expo.
Our motorcade snaked its way past the endless lines of visitors who were sweating in the humid rain. Fleets of electric cars ferried around rich or important Chinese. When we got out of the vans, we felt like dwarfs at the feet of China’s towering, flamboyant red “Crown of the East.” No pavilion was allowed to exceed China’s in height, and to ensure that no pavilion came even close, the Chinese produced a structure three times higher than anything around it. The traditional interlocking wooden brackets formed what looked like an inverted pyramid with its tip buried in the ground or a monumental emperor’s crown. The fair’s motto, “Better City, Better Life,” motivated many of the foreign exhibitors to showcase energy-efficient and sustainable designs. China’s pavilion was a display of power and might that seemed designed to appeal to patriotic pride.
While Clinton sped to the top of the emperor’s crown in a VIP elevator, the rest of us made our way up with Chinese citizens. VIP visits to such a pavilion in China or even in some other countries usually prompted security officials to shut off the whole building or sections of it from the general public. But Hillary’s team had insisted there need not be any closures on her account.
Shanghai’s mayor Han Zheng guided Clinton through the main attraction of the pavilion, the jewel in the crown: a mesmerizing, animated re-creation of a twelfth-century panoramic scroll depicting life during the culturally vibrant Song dynasty. All the tiny details in the twenty-foot-high display of “Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival” came to life in the darkened room—men poled river junks, caravans passed through the forest, women carried goods back from the market, and lanterns lit up as day turned to night in a continuous loop. A bed of water ran all along the four-hundred-foot-long tableau, mirroring the ancient Bian River in the painting.