They Afforded Dick

In February of 1972 Richard Nixon touched down here in Beijing, ending twenty-three years of estrangement between the United States and China.  And as the story goes Richard Nixon bounded down the stairs off Air Force One, with his hand outstretched to grab the hand of Premier Zhou En Lai.   This, because eighteen years earlier Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had refused to shake the hand of Zhou En Lai at the Geneva Convention in 1954.   Nixon went out of his way to ensure that the shake was shook and that the snub was overtly undone. 

There are photos, of course, and it is almost certain that American photographers were allowed to snap pics, just like the Chinese.  Obama landed here yesterday and forty-four years later while most aspects of the relationship have made unrecognizably profound progress, the basics of diplomatic choreography appear to have taken a step backward.

I don’t know where the blame lies but it seems a bit ridiculous that the Chinese hosts could not provide the correct stairs-on-wheels apparatus to allow the Barack the same courtesy they afforded Dick.  Then, things descended into a shouting match with Susan Rice ducking under a rope and people saying “this is our president and our plane, we aren’t moving,” to which the Chinese replied:  “this is our country.”  Later the hosts tried to limit the number of press that could attend the presidential meeting, suggesting that the room wasn’t big enough, when it was clear there was quite a bit of space, for all to see.    

What happened?  These things make neither side look good.  How did the Chinese, for whom hosting is supposed to be an art and a mark of civilization, bungle this basic protocol?  One might suppose that it was done on purpose to reinforce Chinese ascendency and to demonstrate an unwillingness to take orders on home soil.  I’m sure the U.S. is rather particular about who gets to stand where and why at Camp David.  Perhaps the U.S. is used to doing what it likes and was thwarted by upstanding Chinese au contraire found the Obama team abruptly improvising.  Who knows what really happened?  But the climate change agreement notwithstanding, I was left deflated when I read about all the sideline noise to something that should have been cleared and arranged for at least, two months earlier.  If it really was simply poor planning . . . someone should be given a stair on wheels to exit the stage from.