MCLC: personal diplomacy

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: personal diplomacy
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (6/4/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/us/politics/us-china-meetings-aim-persona
l-diplomacy.html

U.S.-China Meeting’s Aim: Personal Diplomacy
By MARK LANDLER and JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — When Tom Donilon, President Obama’s national security
adviser, met with President Xi Jinping in Beijing last week to discuss his
coming visit to the United States, China’s newly minted leader told him he
wanted a conversation with Mr. Obama that did not involve diplomatic
talking points. As if to underscore the message, he ignored the notes
sitting in front of him.

When Mr. Xi arrives on Friday for his first visit as president, Mr. Obama
will make his own symbolic gesture, welcoming him amid the olive trees and
artificial lakes of a 200-acre California estate.

In more than six hours of meetings over two days, with ample time for
dinner and a sunset stroll beneath the San Jacinto Mountains,
administration officials hope Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi, who met for the first
time last year in Washington, will really get to know each other, while
exchanging ideas about how best to manage a complex, sometimes combustible
relationship between the world’s two biggest economies.

It is an enormous bet on the power of personal diplomacy, in a setting
carefully chosen to nurture a high-level friendship.

Rarely, if ever, have American and Chinese leaders had so much unscripted
time together. Jiang Zemin met with George W. Bush at Mr. Bush’s ranch in
Crawford, Tex., in 2002, but it was shortly before Mr. Jiang stepped down.
And after talking for an hour, the two men jumped into a truck for a tour
of the ranch, ate barbecue and held a news conference.

This time the setting will not be a ranch but Sunnylands, the desert
retreat in Rancho Mirage built by Walter H. Annenberg, where Ronald Reagan
celebrated New Year’s Eve and Richard M. Nixon went to lick his wounds
after Watergate.

For Mr. Obama, who is keenly interested in Asia but has little emotional
connection to China, it is a chance to escape the stifling protocol of
state visits and establish a rapport with Mr. Xi that the president never
enjoyed with his predecessor, Hu Jintao.

Mr. Obama, his aides say, was frustrated that he rarely broke through in a
dozen stilted encounters with Mr. Hu, who would respond with bland talking
points, even when, for example, the president implored him to do more to
curb the nuclear threat from North Korea.

For Mr. Xi, a tough-minded party veteran whose no-nonsense style recalls
Deng Xiaoping, it is a chance to set the tone for his most important
diplomatic relationship at the start of what is expected to be a decade
atop the Chinese power structure.

“Their leadership was very open to this kind of encounter,” Mr. Donilon
said. “They sense that this is an important moment in the relationship.”
The choice of Sunnylands, about 120 miles southeast of Los Angeles, with
its history as a place where Republican presidents and their Hollywood
friends went to unwind, was calculated to give this diplomatic first date
the best chance of succeeding. Even the estate’s Republican lineage may
play a part, at least metaphorically.

“Sunnylands is a West Coast monument to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan,”
said Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the Center for U.S.-China
Relations at the Asia Society. “The last time the U.S.-China relationship
broke through was Nixon and Kissinger.”

Mr. Xi has on a number of occasions signaled his desire to break from
normal protocol. At a meeting with Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew, he
also did without talking points, prompting Mr. Lew to set aside his own
notes.

Most significant, Mr. Xi, while vice president, spent about 20 hours with
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in reciprocal visits. In those
encounters, administration officials said, Mr. Xi expressed a keen
interest in how China figured in American politics.

Mr. Biden, for his part, emphasized that the militaries of the two
countries needed to communicate better, particularly given that China’s
growing military might is putting its warships and planes closer to
American ones. The substantive nature of the meetings helped persuade the
White House that it was worth putting Mr. Xi and Mr. Obama together sooner
than the diplomatic calendar would have dictated.

Mr. Xi, analysts in Beijing said, has two very different goals: to nurture
trust, yet project self-confidence. He appears genuinely to want a stable
and productive relationship, but there is also widespread wariness of
American intentions, said Sun Zhe, director of the Center for U.S.-China
Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

“China hopes that this visit will help to build personal ties and
friendship between the two leaders so that conflicts in relations can be
moderated,” Mr. Sun said in an interview. “But expectations cannot be too
high; otherwise, they’ll be followed by frustration.”

Tensions between the United States and China have flared over the Obama
administration’s so-called strategic pivot to Asia, which some Chinese,
particularly in the military, have viewed as an American plot to check
China’s influence in its region.

“This isn’t prewired for success,” said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a top China
adviser in the Clinton administration now at the Brookings Institution.
“There is a sense that the relationship has gotten into trouble. Both
sides feel it can no longer be treated in a regularized manner.”

Cheng Li, another China expert at Brookings, noted that after a brief
honeymoon when Mr. Xi assumed power, he has already sowed suspicion among
liberal elites in China with his strong ties to the military and what some
see as nationalistic impulses.

Whatever the Sunnylands summit meeting might mean for United States-China
relations, it will reset the Annenberg estate’s long-established image as
a Republican playground, where presidents relaxed with guests who included
Frank Sinatra and Queen Elizabeth II.

“This place was created specifically for just this kind of meeting,” said
Geoffrey Cowan, president of the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands.
“It’s beautiful; it’s completely private; it’s secure.”

David Dreier, a recently retired House Republican leader who now leads an
Annenberg commission on Pacific issues, said he told Mr. Obama about the
estate at a White House reception in December and added, “One of my
priorities is to get you there.”

Other officials at the foundation also promoted the estate as a
presidential location, so when the Chinese agreed to a meeting outside
Washington, the White House director of scheduling, Danielle Crutchfield,
raised the idea of holding it there.

Mr. Xi will arrive in California from Mexico after a three-country visit
to Latin America, while Mr. Obama was planning to be in California for two
Democratic fund-raisers.

There are limits to the coziness. Mr. Xi will not stay on the estate but
at a nearby Hyatt hotel — a reflection of Chinese concerns about
eavesdropping, according to a person familiar with the planning.
Translators will be required, since Mr. Xi is not fluent in English. And
while Mr. Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan, is traveling with him, Michelle Obama is
not planning to accompany her husband, which will deprive the meeting of a
layer of informality.

Still, other Americans who have met Mr. Xi recently expressed some
optimism for the Sunnylands summit meeting. George P. Shultz, a secretary
of state in the Reagan administration who was part of a small delegation
to Beijing that also included Henry A. Kissinger, said the Chinese “are
really trying to give us a message that they want to have a constructive,
not a confrontational, relationship with us.”

Chris Buckley contributed reporting from Hong Kong