US Envoy In Beijing Charms And Unsettles

US Envoy In Beijing Charms And Unsettles

WSJ 1/19/2011

Summoned for a diplomatic dressing down last year, Jon Huntsman Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Beijing, hopped on his sturdy 'Forever' brand Chinese bicycle and pedaled off to the Foreign Ministry.

Flustered guards there, expecting the U.S. representative to sweep up in an armored Cadillac made him park by a side gate and walk in.

The unceremonious arrival--at once suggesting humility and defiance--was typical of Mr. Huntsman, a Mandarin-speaking former Mormon missionary and the son of a billionaire who has set himself the ambitious goal of 'humanizing' the world's most important bilateral relationship.

Since taking over one of America's top ambassadorial posts in 2009, the former Utah governor and possible Republican presidential candidate has made a habit of challenging diplomatic protocol to both charm and unsettle his hosts.

Over the last year, the father of seven children who used to drive a Harley Davidson around Salt Lake City has, in fact, turned up on his bicycle to receive several official reprimands over issues including U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.

His unusual approach encapsulates the increasingly symbiotic, yet conflicted relationship between the world's dominant power and its emerging Asian rival, one that will be on display when Chinese President Hu Jintao visits Washington this week for the first state visit since 1997.

Huntsman has given key advice to both sides on how to sell the relationship to their respective domestic audiences ahead of the trip and will be on hand for Hu's full itinerary to help choreograph the visit and ensure its success.

'If I were to summarize kind of what everyone's trying to do I think it's to humanize the U.S.-China relationship, to put it in terms that people on both sides really understand,' Huntsman, 50 years old, said in an interview late last week.

'If you can't humanize the relationship, and prove that it's of value to the average citizen, then they're not going to support it, in which case it's of limited value.'

That message rings as true for Beijing as it does for Washington as they try to define their respective roles in the world following a global financial crisis in 2008 that amplified China's emergence as a world power.

The diplomatic certainties that once anchored relations between the two countries have long disappeared. During the Cold War, they found common cause in opposition to the Soviet Union. When China embraced capitalism in the late 1970s, American businesses rushed in to profit from a vast new market for their goods and services. Now, following a series of public disputes last year, China and the U.S. are struggling to define a common agenda that spans the full range of their political, military and economic interests.

'This is a historic visit in the sense that it's the first time ever that both the United States and China have been on the world stage together and they're trying to figure out how to cooperate,' Huntsman said.

'We've met before but never with the glare of the spotlight quite like it is today and the expectations being as high as they are.'

Huntsman was an unconventional choice for the Beijing job: Previous presidents have mostly chosen loyal political supporters with a strong security or business pedigree. Only one was a former elected official, James Sasser, who served in Beijing from 1996 to 1999, and he was at the end of his political career.

When President Barack Obama asked Huntsman to take the post in May 2009, the move was hailed by some Washington pundits as a way to neutralize a potential rival in the 2012 presidential elections.

If that was indeed the idea, its success is not yet guaranteed--Huntsman agreed to do the job only for two years, and hasn't ruled out running in 2012.

He's unusually qualified to represent the U.S. in China following a career that has also included stints as ambassador to Singapore, deputy assistant commerce secretary, deputy trade representative, and an executive in the family plastics business, Huntsman Corp.

Unlike his predecessors, he has a rare combination of political, linguistic and commercial skills. And perhaps more than any other public figure--American or Chinese--his life encompasses the span of modern China-U.S. relations.

In 1971, as an 11-year-old, Huntsman accompanied his father, a plastics tycoon and special assistant to President Richard Nixon, to the White House and met Henry Kissinger just as he was heading to the airport on a secret mission to open diplomatic contacts with China.

Huntsman recalls being allowed to carry Kissinger's briefcase to a waiting car.

After dropping out of high school in the 1970s to play keyboard in a rock band, Huntsman spent two years living as a Mormon missionary and learning Mandarin in Taiwan, the island that Beijing regards as a rebel province. He later resumed his studies and gained a degree in international politics from the University of Pennsylvania.

He first went to Beijing in 1984 when, as a White House aide, he accompanied Ronald Reagan in a meeting with Deng Xiaoping, China's former leader.

As a trade official and as Utah governor, he visited China several times and learned the art of negotiating with Chinese officials. He and his wife also adopted a Chinese girl who was abandoned in a vegetable market in the eastern city of Yangzhou.

In the meantime, Huntsman Corp. has become a major investor in China, with at least five manufacturing facilities.

Since taking over as ambassador, he has had to draw on all that experience to keep relations on track during one of the most testing periods of their evolution.

Soon after he arrived, he invited about 70 Chinese and foreign reporters to his residence, greeted them in fluent Mandarin, and told them to 'Take a look around and feel at home!'.

Huntsman has also made a point of bicycling around the neighborhood where he lives. He queues with his wife for a table at a local hot-pot restaurant, and one of his favorite lunchtime haunts is a simple street food stall serving spicy Sichuan food close to the embassy that's a bit too basic even for his staff.

This week, he invited local reporters to the embassy and began by telling them how his adopted Chinese daughter--one of his seven children--was born in the Year of the Rabbit, about to come around again, and was designing the Lunar New Year card that he was preparing to send.

Touches like these undoubtedly generate goodwill--and positive write-ups in state media.

But Huntsman's political prospects have done as much, if not more, to enhance his influence and access among senior Chinese officials, who follow American politics increasingly closely. His understanding of U.S. and Chinese politics also puts him in the unusual position of being able to explain the importance of improving China's image with the American public.

'It's awfully hard for American families who are trying pay the bills and make some sense of the complicated world we live in to kind of take China and recognize it for what it is and put it in rational terms, particularly after reading [about] the latest flight of the stealth J-20 on the Drudge Report,' he said.

The idea that he could, in theory, one day lead the U.S. may also explain why he gets away with some of his less conventional exploits, according to fellow Western diplomats.

When Chinese authorities abruptly canceled a trip they had organized for him to the mostly Muslim northwestern region of Xinjiang in July, Huntsman went on his own anyway as a private citizen.

'Trade is all good: 400 billion bucks--that's a big account. But there are some other perhaps more sensitive and subtle issues that I think are a direct extension of who we are as people,' he said.

'If you can't somehow fit that in to what you do, even if you break the rules every now and again, then we're just like any other country.'

Jeremy Page