Xi’s American Journey

[xchrom]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/02/xis-american-journey.html



On September 23, 1959, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev waded potbelly-first into a cornfield in Coon Rapids, Iowa. It was the height of the Cold War: Sputnik had shaken American confidence, and Khrushchev had promised to “bury” the West, pounding his shoe at the United Nations in defense of Soviet foreign policy. He had nevertheless accepted Ike’s invitation, and he’d come to Iowa to glimpse a high-tech American farm, with a swarm of reporters. Not everything went perfectly. At one point, aides hustled Mr. K out of the path of an oncoming tractor, which promptly dumped a load of corn on the press corps. The proud Ukrainian peasant in Khruschev couldn’t help but see things he admired. “You are very intelligent people, but God has helped you,” he told his hosts. The farmer, a prosperous corn king named Roswell (Bob) Garst, had a mixed message of his own:
“You know, for a peasant, you’re a damned poor horse trader.” The farm visit was, by the standards of the time, a success—“one of the most folksy and jovial days of his visit,” a reporter wrote—and has come to be credited for helping to humanize the superpowers at a moment of rising tension.

When Xi Jinping, China’s vice-president, touched down in Iowa this week for a farm visit of his own, the trip embodied a very different kind of rivalry. This is not the Cold War, and Xi is no shoe-pounder, but it is a moment of immense and uncertain potential. If everything goes according to the script, Xi will take over his country this fall, as president and head of the Communist Party, at a time when China is riven by contradictions. It is asserting its diplomatic power across Asia and around the world, but struggling to contain explosive tensions at home.

The White House has chosen to greet Xi with an unprecedented level of pomp for a man who technically remains only a vice-president: a flag-lined military honor cordon; a performance by Joshua Bell; meetings at the Oval Office, Pentagon, and Capitol Hill. Chinese brass don’t usually stray far, but Xi has a soft spot for Iowa because he visited in 1985 as director of the Feed Association of Shijazhuang Prefecture. This time, he is being treated to a spread that is the Iowan equivalent of imperial cuisine: bacon-wrapped pork tenderloin, Angus beef tenderloin, bacon-lettuce-and-tomato bites, and potatoes stuffed with white cheddar. It’s a menu intended to celebrate the prospects for American agricultural exports to China, though the scale of it —nutritionists have objected to no avail—is likely to remind some of Xi Jinping’s pointed comment a few years go about “a few foreigners, with full bellies, who have nothing better to do than try to point fingers at our country…. China does not export revolution, hunger or poverty; nor does China cause you any headaches. What else do you want?”

With the Romney campaign seeking to outflank the Administration on China, the White House has balanced the red-carpet treatment with blunt criticism, delivered through smiles: At a State Department lunch, Vice-President Biden used his champagne toast to unroll a long list of grievances—theft of intellectual property, jailed dissidents, human-rights abuses, China’s veto to prevent sanctions against Syria—while Xi looked on with the Mona Lisa smile that distinguishes him from his dour predecessor, Hu Jintao. It is a strange sight, a combination of red-carpet treatment and candid disapproval that is guaranteed to leave both China’s boosters and critics uneasy.


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/02/xis-american-journey.html#ixzz1mem4v3Iu


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/02/xis-american-journey.html#ixzz1melpI57a