by Kim Ghattas
Fred and his agents struggled to keep the crowd from trampling all over their diamond, the formation of four agents they constantly maintained around the secretary. This was a highly policed country and she was surrounded by officials from the Communist Party, but even a friendly crowd could get out of hand and crush Evergreen, especially in the semidarkness of the seemingly never-ending hall. After a buffet lunch of assorted indistinguishable Chinese fare, it was time to leave, with a detour through the regional Chinese pavilions, where women in traditional dress smiled, mostly silently, at visitors. Occasionally, groups of visitors shrieked, “We love you, Hillary!” to which she responded with her signature big smile and a wave. Just before exiting, Hillary posed with Haibao, the expo’s cuddly blue mascot. According to the expo’s website, the sky-blue color, which matched Hillary’s coat, symbolized “latitude and imagination,” representing “the rising and potential of China.”
Other than the cheap-looking Haibao, who resembled the clay Gumby character, the Chinese pavilion was as grand as a museum; the contrast with the USA pavilion could not have been greater. They were emblematic of their respective country’s history, values, and attitude toward the world, but mostly they reflected their current states of mind. China had smaller provincial pavilions across the fairground and other structures showcasing the “State Shipbuilding Corporation” and China’s “glorious railways”—never mind that design flaws in the country’s high-speed rails were causing accidents.
We asked the secretary what she thought of the house she had helped build.
“It’s fine. Can you imagine if we had not been here?”
Showing up was what it was all about, and America had been part of the show.
* * *
Over the next six months, ten million visitors would walk through the Chinese pavilion. Seven million visited the American one, the second most popular exhibit. It was an astounding number considering that China had the home turf advantage. Washington and Beijing had shared the stage at the expo, and they were doing so increasingly around the world. They received an almost equal amount of the world’s love, hate, and attention—but for very different reasons.
The two world powers were sparring over Iran, one of China’s top suppliers of oil, and North Korea, China’s poorer and unruly ally, both of which were at the fair. In fact, China had paid for North Korea’s first-ever pavilion at a world expo. It stood wall-to-wall with Iran, and together in a forlorn corner, they formed two-thirds of the axis of evil. There were no lines outside either pavilion; whatever they had to offer was apparently of no interest to visitors. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK, as it was officially known, proudly advertised that it was a “Paradise for People.” A fountain stood in the middle, though with its green and red lighting and cherubs, it looked more like Las Vegas than paradise. The tiny fake meadow with a small bridge over a tiny stream, symbolizing the country’s Taedong River, and the video of children intercut with footage of a missile launch didn’t help North Korea’s image. Photographs of its dictator since 1994, Kim Jong Il, hung on the walls, as well as pictures of an eerily empty Pyongyang—more reminders, as if any were needed, that North Korea was not a happy country. The pavilion was small and felt bare; you could see the exit the instant you entered. The handful of people who walked into the neon-lit structure every now and then seemed to head straight for the way out.
Next door, China’s second-largest supplier of oil attracted many more visitors than North Korea. Built to showcase traditional Islamic architecture, Iran’s pavilion boasted its own fountain, Iranian musicians performed six times a day, and Iranian rugs were on sale on the upper level. A huge picture of Iran’s political and religious leadership at prayer covered one of the walls, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The pavilion also displayed Iran’s achievements, from medical equipment to a harp with lasers rather than strings and a stuffed goat. A proud placard declared that, apart from Iran, “Only a few countries such as the U.S., the UK, Canada and China have a cloned goat in their list of achievement.” Despite belonging to that exclusive club of goat cloners, Iran somehow felt it still needed a nuclear program to feel powerful.
Hillary could be a mischievous diplomat, often prodding people out of established patterns to elicit different outcomes or more candid answers, but at the world expo she did not attempt any creative diplomacy by visiting the two pavilions. The stakes were too high. Iran was facing more sanctions, and there was no room for a free gesture of engagement. And North Korea stood accused of sinking a South Korean military ship, the Cheonan, that past March, killing forty-six seamen. Pyongyang denied it had done anything wrong; China claimed the ship had touched an American sea mine. The Russians were vague. Cold War reflexes died hard. Everybody had been waiting for the results of the international investigation that was attempting to determine exactly what had happened.
The results had been released just as we had arrived in Asia for the expo. “Based on all such relevant facts and classified analysis, we have reached the clear conclusion that the [Republic of Korea’s] ‘Cheonan’ was sunk as the result of an external underwater explosion caused by a torpedo made in North Korea. The evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the torpedo was fired by a North Korean submarine. There is no other plausible explanation.”
The North Koreans spouted angrily. On their state-run television stations, melodramatic newscasters who generally praised their leader Kim Jong Il in wavering lofty tones switched on the hatred and delivered warnings to the outside world at the top of their voices. Newspapers ran long diatribes.
“We had already warned the South Korean group of traitors not to make reckless remarks concerning the sinking of warship ‘Cheonan’ of the puppet navy. We sternly warn the U.S. and Japanese authorities and riff-raffs, their poor lackeys, to act with discretion. The world will clearly see what dear price the group of traitors will have to pay for the clumsy ‘conspiratorial farce’ and ‘charade’ concocted to stifle compatriots.”
The expo had been a welcome interlude of cultural diplomacy, but tomorrow, in Beijing, Hillary would have to wade into this quagmire with the Chinese.
* * *
In the Chinese capital, Paul Narain was holding his last countdown meeting before our Sunday arrival. He had been assigned as the advance line officer for this trip and had been here a week already, his longest advance in two years on the job. He had already been on a four-day pre-advance trip a month earlier. He had clocked 130 hours and thousands of e-mails to Washington this week and was more sleep deprived than he had been on any other trip, worse even than the previous fall’s Pakistan-to-Morocco-to-Egypt extravaganza. Every advance required two or three countdown meetings with about twenty embassy officials to make sure everything was running on schedule and every detail had been taken into account. This advance required four meetings and a gymnasium. Paul ran through all the details one more time. “This must be a mistake,” he thought when he first caught a glimpse of the schedule and list of more than three hundred attendees. “We can’t possibly take this many people on a trip.”
There was no mistake. The U.S. government always arrived in a big way, but this group was monstrous. The United States and China were holding the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, a yearly, somewhat unwieldy, diplomatic exercise between two world powers. The S&ED was a two-day talkfest where anything and everything on which the two countries collaborated was on the table, from climate change to logging, education exchange programs, and China’s currency exchange rate. It was a way for China and the United States to learn how to stay focused on everything they could agree on while working out their differences. A version of the dialogue had taken place during the Bush administration, but with Obama it became even more comprehensive.
Several hundred U.S. officials would be coming to town: every government agency, every department, every senior official wanted in on the dialogue with America’s banker and was eager to
be in the room with the world’s next superpower. Even more than that, they wanted airtime to prove their relevance in the most important bilateral relationship their country had. Without it, the rest of the U.S. bureaucracy might think they were dispensable, and furthermore, if the Chinese didn’t hear your voice in a room with three hundred people and dozens of U.S. government agencies, you were irrelevant. If the Chinese didn’t know you existed, then you were out of the game. The S&ED was not just about tangible agreements but also about perception.
The United States had become obsessed with staying ahead of China. Nothing else seemed to matter. Just under half of Americans24 believed that China had already surpassed the United States as the world’s superpower, or was at least well under way to do so. They looked at the numbers and saw an economy still growing at a rate of 10 percent per year while theirs was sputtering along at 2 or 3 percent. Everything they bought at home seemed to be made in China. America was being drained by war while China was buying up Africa. China was booming, and the United States was going bust. It was the same middle-of-the-night anxiety that had suburban parents in America scheming for ways to afford Mandarin lessons. But the United States seemed fixated rather than motivated, a worry fueled by neurosis. The figures were certainly a reality, but America seemed to be thinking itself into further decline. Even Obama kept referring to China’s faster trains and newer airports. The comparison was meant to entice Americans to buckle down and get to work, but it often had the opposite, depressing effect. The United States had fretted about being overtaken by Japan in the 1980s, and the Asian economic giant had eventually gone bust. But this time, Americans were sure it was real—China was going to swallow them.
Although 63 percent of Chinese believed their country had already overtaken, or was going to overtake, the United States as the world’s superpower,25 they were ambivalent about having the spotlight on their country. The Global Times, a government-backed newspaper, published an editorial in reaction to one of Obama’s speeches, accusing the United States of China bashing, a “strategy that intensifies and exploits public fear of the unknown.”
The importance of the relationship between the two countries was perhaps best symbolized by the size of the American embassy in Beijing—it was the largest in the world. Paul’s first countdown meeting had taken place in a small auditorium with several dozen embassy employees. But every minute of the day, another employee approached him to say they should be included because they were a guide on one of the motorcade buses or in charge of food for the teams that would await the delegations’ arrivals at the airport. So he held his final countdown meeting in the embassy gymnasium, and two hundred people attended. He ordered pizza for everybody. It lasted three hours. An entire team was assigned to organizing the motorcade. Usually, details of who sat in which car or which bus were included in the daily mini-schedules that each member of the delegation received. But in this case, there were buses and buses and buses, and the list of passengers was thirty-two pages long. Staple guns were brought in to handle the three hundred schedules. Paul and his colleagues from the State Department and the Treasury had planned everything down to the last detail. Their eager and meticulous Chinese counterparts went even further: at two in the morning, they knocked on Paul’s door to review the planning one more time, just in case.
Paul just kept plugging along on the details. Part of the job of advance officers was to make sure that the form didn’t destroy the content. The two days of talks would consist of one hundred hours of dialogue (a dream for the Chinese, who loved to dilute substance in the fluff of meetings and make grand statements that revealed little). But if Paul and his team rubbed their hosts the wrong way, demanding that four thousand credentials be printed in a day or trampling all over the flower beds on their way out, it would undo all the diplomatic efforts. In China, the form was almost more important than the substance. The obsession with preserving face drove everyone’s actions. It was a concept that combined reputation, honor, and pride, and the threshold for losing face in China seemed higher than even in Arab societies. Paul also wanted everything to be perfect and wanted to make sure the secretary and all the other U.S. officials who were coming would look good, but for Americans small hiccups were not experienced as collective national embarrassment.
And now weeks, no, months of preparations were being overshadowed by the Cheonan crisis. Hours of talks on every single issue of interest to China and the United States had been planned, but the only topic anyone was interested in asking about was tension on the Korean peninsula. Washington wanted Beijing to acknowledge what had happened and scold Kim Jong Il, the “Dear Leader” in Pyongyang. All eyes were on China. How would it perform in this international crisis? Was it indeed turning into a responsible world power, telling off friends after bad behavior? Or would the cult of face prevail?
* * *
The Cheonan sinking was an unprecedented event for this generation of Chinese leaders. They were treading very carefully. Bellicose North Korea, a Soviet ally since 1948, became China’s protégé during the Korean War in the early 1950s. The relationship was a legacy of the Cold War: it perpetuated a proxy war between China and the United States and created a balance of power. The United States military was still seven times larger than China’s, but with its nuclear program and missile testing, Pyongyang was helping Beijing to keep Washington on its toes.
Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s first ruler, had been installed in the North after the end of World War II by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Below the 38th parallel that divided the country, the South was in the American camp. But in 1950, Kim decided he wanted to unify the country under his command. He convinced China’s Mao Zedong that North Korean troops would be able to march south of the 38th parallel that divided the country and conquer it—so quickly, in fact, that the United States would have no time to send troops to help its ally, Syngman Rhee, in Seoul even if it wanted to.
Mao started planning China’s entry into the Korean War before U.S. troops even got close to the 38th parallel, just in case, although he entered the war only when the Americans overreached.26 Mao wanted to make sure North Korea wouldn’t fall; he wanted to prevent American imperialism from becoming victorious, dizzy with success and in a position to threaten China.27 Mao also did it to mobilize public opinion in China and consolidate his own power in a country emerging from civil war. Although tens of thousand of Chinese troops died in the war, they fought the United States to a stalemate on the 38th parallel and held on to North Korea. The Communist country emerged with its sense of national pride and unity restored. Crucially, the Chinese were led to believe that the war started because of America’s expansionist designs rather than an invasion launched by their North Korean friends. Decades later, the narrative persisted: North Korea was the underdog, America the imperialist hegemon.
Unlike the United States, which had some fifty formal military alliances and countless programs of cooperation binding it to dozens of countries around the world, China’s friends were strategic liabilities. Many of China’s friends were weak, like Nepal and Cambodia; its closest allies were really client states, and rogue ones at that: North Korea and Burma. Pyongyang was proving to be increasingly unpredictable and capricious. The North Koreans saw China as their ATM, and though Beijing kept them afloat with food and aid, North Korea was always trying to attract America’s attention, pushing for direct talks with Washington while the United States insisted that any negotiations with Pyongyang had to include the Chinese, the Japanese, and other world players. The North Koreans just wanted a deal with America. The Chinese were relieved that at least Burma seemed reliable, staying in their camp. China also had many business partners, but its checkbook was meant for resources to feed its own growing economy—not love.
* * *
Sitting on the tarmac in Shanghai, with dozens of planes ahead of us lined up for takeoff, we settled into our seats for a long wait. SAM rarely, if ever, requested special treatment. But the Chinese were not about to
let the American secretary of state bake in the midday sun in an aluminum tube, so we taxied to the head of the line and took off for Beijing, where we landed two hours later to a hiccup that no amount of planning by Paul and his team could have foreseen.
The DS agents and the traveling press corps were always first off the plane, through the back door and down the stairs, giving Fred’s team time to take up their positions on the ground and allowing the camera crew traveling with us, recording the secretary’s every move, to be ready to film her waving hello as she came out of the front door of the plane. During those few minutes, with Huma’s help, Hillary would freshen up in her cabin, putting on the finishing touches to her attire.
But in Beijing, airport workers had trouble lining up the stairs with the front door of the plane. The hydraulic lift didn’t seem to work. There was frantic yammering in the walkie-talkies and running around. Chinese officials, impassive at first, stood in line waiting to greet their VIP guest. Airport workers drove a second set of stairs to the plane, but America’s plane and China’s steps just did not want to line up. The Chinese officials were starting to fidget. This was an embarrassment to their country. Third time lucky—the American ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, walked up the steps and escorted the secretary down. As always, Fred emerged a few moments later, followed by Huma, to make sure photographers could first get a clear shot of the secretary as she walked down.
State Councilor Dai Bingguo hosted Clinton at dinner, as always a stunningly delicate display of hospitality with elaborate meals and entertainment. The Chinese always devoted the first meeting or meal to small talk and entertainment. They asked her about her trip so far and how she had enjoyed Shanghai.