The Secretary (26 page)

The Chinese mostly smiled politely though some were no doubt disappointed by the lack
of frills (the Saudi pavilion, for example, had an IMAX 3D movie theater that was
a sensation). But the audience reaction to the American pavilion seemed mostly positive.
A young couple said they were touched by “American humanity”; one man said he was
impressed by how children had such heart. China was a country where the individual
was subordinate to the Communist Party and children served their parents and society,
and where despite the booming economy millions of citizens were poor and left behind.
A film focused on children was a novelty; a little girl getting older people to gather
around a project was unheard of in a country where civic activism had long been suppressed.

But I could see how the videos were also a small window into a normalcy that was out
of reach for millions of Chinese and billions of others around the world. The roads
looked safe, the streets were neat and lined with trees and grass; people looked friendly,
and most importantly they seemed carefree. It was a film, of course: people in the
United States weren’t all carefree; they toiled long hours, lacked health care, lost
their jobs. But there was something in those films to envy. Trying to tap into whatever
it was the Chinese might have been feeling, I thought back to my first visit to the
United States in 1996. My sister Ingrid lived in San Francisco then, and we had gone
for a walk around the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, a half hour
drive across the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. A group of students was playing
a ball game on the green grass on campus. Others lay around chatting, studying in
the sun, their books scattered around them. Everything about these young students—their
expressions, the way they reclined so easily in the sun, their postures—radiated a
graceful ease. It was so peaceful it looked like a movie; but it was real, I could
feel it. “So that’s what it feels like to be carefree,” I thought. For a fleeting
moment I was painfully envious. I had never had that. Even affluent people in Lebanon
with penthouse apartments overlooking the Mediterranean didn’t look carefree. Fear
was a constant in our lives. Just as it was in the lives of people from Pakistan to
China, places where the rule of law was a joke, baby milk was tainted, policemen dragged
you out of your house in the middle of the night, and the greed of corrupt politicians
left little behind for people to feed on. The Chinese government may have made economic
success available to a vast number of its citizens, but life for the middle class
was still precarious, too dependent on the whims of the powerful. The gap between
rich and poor in China was also bigger than in most of the other big economies, and
much of the country’s wealth was concentrated in the hands of families all connected
to the ruling elite.

The image of America that the Chinese received inside the pavilion was not that of
the country distrusted by proud nationalist Chinese, of the superpower that made unreasonable
demands, encircled them in the Pacific, and lectured them from on high. This was the
America where many Chinese dreamed of immigrating even as their own country boomed;
it was the America that people thought of if they sought refuge in the U.S. embassy
from persecution in their own country.

In the USA pavilion souvenir shop, everything seemed to be made in China. The Chinese
manager asked Hillary to autograph her book
Living History
and then asked for a picture, handing her digital camera to a colleague behind the
till. The two women smiled. The camera switched itself off. The manager grabbed it
and fiddled with it. Hillary smiled. The camera was working again. The cashier tried
to snap a picture. The screen went dark. The manager fiddled some more, determined
to get her picture. “Why don’t I sign the book while you do that,” Hillary said, smiling.
Finally, the digital screen captured a shot of the two women. There were cameras all
around; a swarm of journalists always covered Hillary’s every move. It was hard to
tell where her warmth and patience ended and where her acute self-awareness as a politician
started.

By the main entrance, at the other end of the fairground, the Chinese pavilion, the
size of one thousand soccer pitches, straddled both sides of the Huangpu River. The
government had built the expo in a poor area of the city. Authorities had evicted
more than eighteen thousand families and some two hundred factories by force, clearing
the area with wrecking balls. Government-led development in China was relentless and
brutal, but you would never know it inside the expo.

Our motorcade snaked its way past the endless lines of visitors who were sweating
in the humid rain. Fleets of electric cars ferried around rich or important Chinese.
When we got out of the vans, we felt like dwarfs at the feet of China’s towering,
flamboyant red “Crown of the East.” No pavilion was allowed to exceed China’s in height,
and to ensure that no pavilion came even close, the Chinese produced a structure three
times higher than anything around it. The traditional interlocking wooden brackets
formed what looked like an inverted pyramid with its tip buried in the ground or a
monumental emperor’s crown. The fair’s motto, “Better City, Better Life,” motivated
many of the foreign exhibitors to showcase energy-efficient and sustainable designs.
China’s pavilion was a display of power and might that seemed designed to appeal to
patriotic pride.

While Clinton sped to the top of the emperor’s crown in a VIP elevator, the rest of
us made our way up with Chinese citizens. VIP visits to such a pavilion in China or
even in some other countries usually prompted security officials to shut off the whole
building or sections of it from the general public. But Hillary’s team had insisted
there need not be any closures on her account.

Shanghai’s mayor Han Zheng guided Clinton through the main attraction of the pavilion,
the jewel in the crown: a mesmerizing, animated re-creation of a twelfth-century panoramic
scroll depicting life during the culturally vibrant Song dynasty. All the tiny details
in the twenty-foot-high display of “Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival” came to
life in the darkened room—men poled river junks, caravans passed through the forest,
women carried goods back from the market, and lanterns lit up as day turned to night
in a continuous loop. A bed of water ran all along the four-hundred-foot-long tableau,
mirroring the ancient Bian River in the painting.

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.”