President Bush has flown into Beijing to attend the Olympics opening ceremony Friday night. However, his first duty call was to open the new US embassy at 8.08 AM on Aug 8, mirroring the Games ceremonial start time of 8.08 PM on the same day. The gesture was "a nice tip of the hat" to China, says one US businessman invited to the dedication ceremony.
How far to tip the hat to China has been a tricky issue for the outgoing US president in recent days. He has garnered headlines by sprinkling his farewell mini-tour of East Asia with critical remarks about China’s human rights record. Yet he has made clear for months he won’t be repeating those comments publicly once he arrives on Chinese soil. Face-to-face chats with China’s leaders are more productive, he says. The new embassy’s muted colour scheme aims for a similar concept: "It’s...sophisticated and serious in keeping with the level of diplomacy”, State Department architect Jay Holleran who oversaw the project with designers Skidmore, Owings and Merrill told journalists during an open house tour on Tuesday.
As the embassy opening got underway, Reporters Without Borders tipped its hat in the other direction with an illegal radio broadcast in support of free speech. The 20-minute show went out in Beijing at 8.08 AM on the 104.4 FM frequency and contained interviews with an exiled journalist and other dissidents to highlight the “dozens and dozens of journalists and internet users in prison” in China, said RWB general secretary Robert Ménard who anchored it. The show used mini transmitters and antennae and is posted on RWB’s website. (The White House press corps accompanying the president had their own run-in with China's control-meisters; authorities kept them waiting for hours on the tarmac, until around dawn, to sort through red tape and "procedures" for disembarking).
The political juggling at the heart of diplomacy is embodied in the design elsewhere in the embassy compound. The central tower appears to be a glass-fronted office block. Not lack of imagination, but a deliberate "architectural statement about clarity", Bill Prior of the State Department's overseas buildings bureau told me Tuesday. But take a second look, because the real wall of the main building sits a few feet behind the glass curtain. It’s actually a concrete fortress pierced by small, oblong windows, like a gun turret. Transparency can be a tricky thing for diplomats and their governments.
And so it is with the White House dance over human rights in the last few days. Bush hosted five exiled dissidents (but no Tibetans) at the White House last week, and in Bangkok spoke of America’s “firm opposition” to China's suppression of human rights and religious freedom. This drew an equally ritualistic response from China’s Foreign Ministry; it condemned “any words or acts that interfere in other countries' internal affairs”. Hard to tell where the windows and walls are here too.
Both President Bush and his father will attend this evening’s Olympic Games opening ceremony in the Bird’s Nest stadium. In 1989, Bush Senior faced calls for boycotts and sanctions against China far more intense than anything his son has skated around in the months since the Lhasa riots. The elder Bush mostly ignored them, amid criticisms of toadying to commercial interests that every US president has faced since. But China prospered, opening the way to WTO entry accords (finally clinched by President Bill Clinton) that transformed the relationship into mutual economic dependency. Bush senior’s 1989 stance makes him arguably the most influential American president in shaping modern US-China ties. I'm pondering these uncomfortable truths: without his indifference to the human rights lobby China today might much poorer.
Next year marks 30 years of US-China diplomatic relations since Washington switched its embassy from Taipei to Beijing in 1979. Bush is leaving office with the US’ reputation weaker than at any time since WWII, its soft power sapped by its adventures in Iraq, its economy in distress back home. His legacy for US-China relations may prove as lasting as his father’s, but in a wholly different direction. China’s rise may be over-hyped but it’s real and there’s more space for it than previously as the US depends on the partnership much too heavily to offend.
Finally, it’s a shame that embassies are seldom open to the public because this is a fine building. It’s a fortress, of course. There’s a moat in front of the visa office, the gravel paths all double up as fire truck access roads, and the coyly-named dragon wall is a windowless band of black stone two stories high along the base of the building. But it’s also home to a stunning collection of modern Chinese and American art – and red lobby chairs in different heights and sizes that’ll make the place a paradise for behavioral psychologists.
