Shortly after I was confirmed as Secretary, a team of engineers descended on our home in northwest Washington. They installed a bright yellow secure telephone so that even at odd hours of the night, I could speak to the President or an Ambassador in some faraway embassy about sensitive topics. It was a constant reminder that the troubles of the world were never far from home.
At 9:36 on the night of Wednesday, April 25, 2012, the yellow phone rang. It was my Director of Policy Planning and Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan, calling from his own secure line on the seventh floor of the State Department, where he’d hastily returned from a rare night off. He told me that our embassy in Beijing faced an unexpected crisis and urgently needed direction.
Unbeknownst to us, less than a week earlier, a blind, forty-year-old human rights activist named Chen Guangcheng had escaped from house arrest in Shandong Province by climbing over the wall of his home. He broke his foot but managed to elude the local police assigned to watch him. Leaving his family behind, he set out on a journey hundreds of miles to Beijing with the help of a modern-day Underground Railroad of fellow dissidents and supporters. While in hiding in Beijing he made contact with a Foreign Service officer at the American Embassy who had long ties to the Chinese human rights community. She immediately recognized the seriousness of the situation.
Chen had gained notoriety in China as the “barefoot lawyer,” advocating for the rights of the disabled, helping rural villagers protest illegal land seizures by corrupt local authorities, and documenting abuses of the one-child policy such as forced sterilizations and abortions. Unlike many other high-profile Chinese dissidents, Chen was not a student at an elite university or an urban intellectual. He was a villager himself, poor and self-taught, and the public came to see him as a genuine man of the people. In 2005 he was arrested after filing a class-action lawsuit on behalf of thousands of victims of government repression. A local court sentenced him to fifty-one months in prison, supposedly for destroying property and obstructing traffic. It was a blunt miscarriage of justice, shocking even in a country with little rule of law. After serving out his full sentence, he was released into house arrest, surrounded by armed guards and cut off from the outside world.
Now he was injured, on the run, and asking for our help. At dawn in Beijing, two U.S. Embassy officers met in secret with Chen. With Chinese State Security hunting for him, he asked if he could take refuge at the embassy, at least long enough to receive medical attention and devise a new plan. They agreed to relay the request to Washington, where it quickly made its way up the chain. Chen continued to circle the Beijing suburbs in a car, waiting for a response.
A number of factors made this a particularly difficult decision. First there were the logistics. Chen had a broken foot and was a wanted man. If we didn’t act quickly, he would likely be captured. To make matters worse, Chinese security regularly maintained a robust presence outside our embassy. If Chen tried to walk up to the front door, they would surely seize him before we could even unbolt the lock. The only way to get him safely inside would be to send a team out into the streets to quietly pick him up. Bob Wang, our Deputy Chief of Mission in Beijing, estimated that Chen’s chances of getting in on his own were less than 10 percent. He thought it was above 90 percent if we went out and got him. That, however, would certainly increase tensions with the Chinese.
Timing was also a factor. As it happened, I was preparing to depart in five days for Beijing myself, to participate in the annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and our Chinese counterparts. It was the culmination of an entire year’s worth of painstaking diplomatic work, and we had a full agenda of important and sensitive issues, including tensions in the South China Sea, provocations from North Korea, and economic concerns like currency valuation and intellectual property theft. If we agreed to help Chen, there was a real chance that the Chinese leaders would be so angry they would cancel the summit. At the very least we could expect much less cooperation on matters of significant strategic importance.
It appeared that I had to decide between protecting one man, albeit a highly sympathetic and symbolic figure, and protecting our relationship with China. On one side of the scale were America’s core values and our status as a beacon of freedom and opportunity; on the other were many of our most urgent security and economic priorities.
As I weighed this decision, I thought of the dissidents who sought refuge in American Embassies in Communist countries during the Cold War. One of them, Cardinal József Mindszenty of Hungary, stayed for fifteen years. In 1989 Fang Lizhi and his wife, Li Shuxian, Chinese physicists and prominent activists during the protests in Tiananmen Square, spent nearly thirteen months in the embassy in Beijing before finally making it to the United States. This legacy hung over the Chen case from the beginning.
I also had in mind a much more recent incident. In February 2012, just two months earlier, a Chinese police chief named Wang Lijun walked into the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu, the capital of the southwestern province of Sichuan, looking for help. Until his fall from grace, Wang had been the right-hand man of Bo Xilai, the powerful Communist Party boss of a nearby province. Wang had helped Bo run a vast network of corruption and graft. He eventually claimed to have knowledge of a cover-up of the murder of a British businessman by Bo’s wife. Bo was a colorful figure and a rising star in the national Communist Party, but his spectacular abuses of power, including the alleged wiretapping of President Hu Jintao, unnerved his elders in Beijing. They began investigating both Bo and Wang. Afraid that he would end up like the poisoned Brit, Wang fled to our consulate in Chengdu with a head full of stories.
While he was inside, security forces loyal to Bo surrounded the building. It was a tense moment. Wang Lijun was no human rights dissident, but we couldn’t just turn him over to the men outside; that would effectively have been a death sentence, and the cover-up would have continued. We also couldn’t keep him in the consulate forever. So after asking Wang what he wanted, we reached out to the central authorities in Beijing and suggested that he would voluntarily surrender into their custody if they would listen to his testimony. We had no idea how explosive his story would prove or how seriously Beijing would take it. We agreed to say nothing about the matter, and the Chinese were grateful for our discretion.
Soon the dominoes started to fall. Bo was removed from power, and his wife was convicted of murder. Even the tightest Chinese censorship couldn’t stop this from becoming an enormous scandal, and it shook confidence in the Communist Party’s leadership at a sensitive time. President Hu and Premier Wen were scheduled to hand over power to a new generation of leaders in early 2013. They badly wanted a smooth transition, not a national furor over official corruption and intrigue.
Now, just two months later, we were facing another test, and I knew the Chinese leadership was more on edge than ever.
I told Jake to set up a conference call with Kurt Campbell, Deputy Secretary Bill Burns, and Counselor Cheryl Mills. Kurt had been coordinating closely with our embassy in Beijing since Chen first made contact, and he told me we probably had less than an hour to make a decision. The embassy had assembled a team that was ready to move to an agreed-upon rendezvous point as soon as I gave the word. We talked it through one more time, and then I said, “Go get him.”
In the end it wasn’t a close call. I have always believed that, even more than our military and economic power, America’s values are the greatest source of strength and security. This isn’t just idealism; it’s based on a clear-eyed evaluation of our strategic position. The United States had talked about human rights in China for decades, across Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Now our credibility was on the line, with the Chinese and also with other countries in the region and around the world. If we didn’t help Chen, it would undermine our position everywhere.
I also was making a calculated gamble that, as the hosts of the upcoming summit, the Chinese had invested at least as much as we had in keeping it on track. Finally, with the Bo Xilai scandal and the impending leadership transition, they had their hands full and wouldn’t have much appetite for a new crisis. I was willing to bet that Beijing would not blow up the entire relationship over this one incident.
Once I gave the go-ahead, things started to move fast. Bob Wang departed the embassy en route to the rendezvous. Meanwhile it fell to Jake to brief the White House. He explained my reasoning and answered skeptical questions. Some of the President’s aides worried that we were about to destroy America’s relationship with China. But no one was prepared to be responsible for leaving Chen to his fate by telling us to stand down. They just wanted me and the State Department to somehow make this problem go away.
While Jake was talking to the White House, a drama right out of a spy novel was unfolding in the streets of Beijing. The embassy car arrived at the rendezvous point, about forty-five minutes away, and Bob caught sight of Chen. He also saw Chinese security in the area. It was now or never. Bob hustled Chen into the car, threw a jacket over his head, and sped off. Bob reported back to Washington with an update from the car, and we all held our breath, hoping that they wouldn’t be stopped before reaching the safety of the embassy grounds. Finally, at nearly 3 A.M. in Washington, Bob called back with the good news: the mission was completed, and Chen was now receiving medical attention from the embassy doctor.
Over the course of the next two days, Bill Burns, Kurt, Cheryl, Jake, and I discussed what to do next. The first step was to make contact with the Chinese, inform them that we had Chen but had made no determination about his status, and ask them to meet so we could come to a resolution before the start of the summit. We thought that if we could get them to discuss the matter in good faith, we were halfway toward a solution.
The second step was to talk with Chen himself. What did he want exactly? Was he prepared to spend the next fifteen years of his life living in the embassy, like Cardinal Mindszenty?
Once we had plotted our course, I told Kurt to get on a plane to Beijing as soon as possible so he could manage the negotiations in person. He would depart late on Friday, April 27, arriving before dawn on Sunday. Bill would follow the next day. We also recalled Ambassador Gary Locke from a family vacation in Bali and tracked down the State Department Legal Advisor, former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh, who happened to be traveling in a remote part of China. When Cheryl reached him and asked how long it would take to get to a secure line, he said at least four hours. “Go,” she said. “I’ll explain when you get there.”
When Kurt touched down in Beijing, he immediately made his way to the third floor of the embassy’s Marine barracks. The Chinese security presence around the compound had grown significantly since the day before, and inside it felt like a siege. Chen appeared frail and vulnerable. It was hard to believe that this slight man with the large dark glasses was at the center of a brewing international incident.
I was relieved to hear from Kurt that he found at least a little good news waiting for him: The Chinese had agreed to meet. Considering we were talking about one of their own citizens, picked up on Chinese soil, that in itself was promising. What’s more, Chen seemed to have already bonded with Bob and some of the other Mandarin-speaking officers at the embassy, and he was declaring his firm desire to remain in China rather than seek asylum or remain in the barracks forever. Chen talked about the abuse he suffered at the hands of the corrupt local authorities in Shandong and expressed his hope that the central government in Beijing would step in and provide justice. He had special faith in Premier Wen, who had a reputation for caring about the poor and disenfranchised. “Grandpa Wen” would surely help if he only knew what was really going on.
As we waited anxiously for negotiations to begin, there was reason to be cautiously optimistic. What was not immediately clear in those early hours was that Chen would turn out to be unpredictable and quixotic, as formidable a negotiator as the Chinese leaders outside.
Kurt’s counterpart on the Chinese side was an experienced diplomat named Cui Tiankai, who was later named Ambassador to the United States. Kurt and I had agreed that in his first meeting with Cui, he would start cautiously and work on establishing some common ground. There was no way we would surrender Chen, but I wanted to resolve this crisis quickly and quietly to protect the relationship and the summit. Both sides needed a win-win outcome. At least that was the plan.
The Chinese were having none of it. “I’ll tell you how you solve this,” Cui said. “Turn Chen over to us immediately. If you really care about the U.S.-China relationship, that’s what you’ll do.” Kurt responded carefully, offering the Chinese the chance to come to the embassy to talk directly to Chen. This only made Cui angrier. He launched into a thirty-minute diatribe about Chinese sovereignty and dignity, growing louder and more impassioned as he went. We were undermining the relationship and insulting the Chinese people, and Chen was a coward, hiding behind American skirts. Over the following hours and days, our team endured five more negotiating sessions, all along the same lines, in ceremonial rooms at the Foreign Ministry. Behind Cui, the Chinese side included a number of senior and quite tense officials from the state security apparatus. They often huddled with Cui immediately before and after the negotiating sessions, but they never spoke in front of the Americans. At one point Kurt witnessed an intense argument between Cui and a senior security official, but he couldn’t hear the details. After ten minutes a frustrated Cui waved his colleague off.
Back at the embassy our team listened as Chen talked about wanting to study law and continuing to be an advocate for reforms inside China. He was familiar with the stories of exiled dissidents who lost their influence once they left the country and lived in safe obscurity in the United States. That was not what he wanted. This was a concern Harold Koh could appreciate. His father, a South Korean diplomat, had fled Seoul after a military coup in 1961 and gone into exile in the United States. Harold spoke movingly of the difficulties Chen would face if he decided to leave China.
Besides being one of our nation’s top legal scholars, Harold was also an accomplished university administrator, and his experience there now came to the fore. He developed a plan that would get Chen out of the embassy, avoid the emotionally charged question of asylum, and provide a face-saving solution for the Chinese before the start of the summit. What if Chen was admitted to study at a Chinese law school, somewhere away from Beijing, and then, after a period of time, perhaps two years, left to pursue his studies at an American university? Harold had close ties with professors and administrators at New York University, which was in the process of setting up a Shanghai campus, and overnight he persuaded the university to offer Chen a fellowship. That allowed us to present a package deal to the Chinese.
The Chinese were skeptical but didn’t reject the proposal out of hand. It appeared that the Communist Party leadership was trying to walk a tightrope between working constructively with us and salvaging the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, and satisfying the concerns of more hard-line elements in the security apparatus. Eventually orders came down to Cui: Do what it takes to get this resolved.
Late in the evening of Monday, April 30, five days after the initial phone call, I boarded an Air Force jet from Andrews heading to Beijing. That gave the negotiators roughly twenty more hours to nail down the details. It was as tense a flight as any I can recall. From the White House the President had sent a clear message: Don’t screw up.
Slowly the outlines of a deal emerged. First Chen would be transferred to a Beijing hospital to receive medical attention for the injuries he suffered during his escape. He would then have the opportunity to tell appropriate authorities about the abuses he had suffered under house arrest in Shandong. Next he would be reunited with his family, who had faced continued harassment since his escape. Then he would leave Beijing for two years of study elsewhere in China, followed by possible study in the United States. The American Embassy would maintain contact with him every step of the way. Kurt presented a list of five or six possible Chinese universities to consider. Cui scanned the list and exploded in anger. “There’s no way he’s going to East China Normal,” Cui roared. “I will not share an alma mater with that man!” That meant we were getting somewhere.
Back at the embassy Chen himself wasn’t so sure. He wanted to speak with his family and have them come to Beijing before making any final decisions; waiting to be reunited was not good enough. Kurt dreaded going back with another request after the Chinese had already conceded so much, but Chen was insistent. Sure enough, the Chinese could not believe it. They were withering in their criticism of Kurt and the team and refused to budge. There was no way Chen’s wife and children would be allowed to come to Beijing until the deal was finalized.
We needed to raise the stakes. The Chinese are famously sensitive to protocol and respectful of authority. We decided to use this to our advantage. Bill Burns was the highest-ranking career diplomat in the U.S. government, and is a widely respected former Ambassador to Jordan and Russia. What’s more, he is among the calmest and steadiest people I’ve ever met, qualities that we desperately needed at the negotiating table. When he arrived on Monday, he joined the next session. Sitting across from Cui, Bill made a soothing and persuasive case, diplomat to diplomat: Just deliver the family and move ahead with the summit, then we can all put this whole incident behind us. Mollified, Cui agreed to take the matter back to his superiors. By midnight, while I was still somewhere over the Pacific, word came back that the family would be on the morning train from Shandong. Now all we needed was for Chen to walk out the door.
When my plane touched down early on May 2, I sent Jake directly to the embassy with my personal encouragement to Chen. After the marathon flight, we had left most of the day open, and the first official event was a private dinner that evening with my Chinese counterpart, State Councilor Dai Bingguo.
Chen was still nervous. He felt safe in the Marine barracks, cared for by an embassy doctor. He had formed a strong relationship with the staff, especially Ambassador Gary Locke, the first Chinese American to serve in that post. Gary’s grandfather had emigrated from China to Washington State, where he found work as a domestic servant, sometimes in exchange for English lessons. Gary was born in Seattle, where his family owned a small grocery store, and went on to become Governor of Washington and Secretary of Commerce. He was a living embodiment of the American Dream, and I was proud to have him as our representative at this delicate time.
Gary and Harold spent hours sitting with Chen, holding his hand, soothing his fears, and talking about his hopes for the future. Twice they arranged for Chen to talk on the phone with his wife as she sped toward Beijing by train. Finally Chen jumped up, full of purpose and excitement, and said, “Let’s go.” The long, difficult drama seemed to finally be coming to an end.
Leaning on the Ambassador’s arm and clutching Kurt’s hand, Chen emerged from the barracks and walked slowly to a waiting van. Once he was safely inside, Jake dialed me from his cell phone and handed it to Chen. After so many stressful days of waiting and worrying, we had the chance to talk at last. “I want to kiss you,” he said. At that moment, I felt the same way about him.
The van arrived at nearby Chaoyang Hospital to a crush of media and security. The Chinese were scrupulous in holding up their end of the bargain: Chen was reunited with his wife and children and then whisked off to be treated by a team of doctors, accompanied by our embassy staff. I released a carefully worded press statement, my first public comment on the episode, saying, “I am pleased that we were able to facilitate Chen Guangcheng’s stay and departure from the U.S. Embassy in a way that reflected his choices and our values.” For their part, the Chinese denounced American interference in their internal affairs, as expected, but kept the summit on track and resisted the temptation to immediately rearrest Chen.
With Chen safely at the hospital, it was time for dinner. Dai and Cui welcomed us to the Wanshousi Temple, a 16th-century complex of quiet courtyards and ornate villas that houses a large collection of ancient artifacts. Dai proudly gave me a tour, and as we admired the jade figurines and graceful calligraphy, the sense of relief was palpable. As Dai and I liked to do, we talked expansively about the importance of the U.S.-China relationship and the sweep of history. The delegations had dinner, and then Dai and I went with Kurt and Cui into a small room for a private conversation. How long it had been since Dai had first shown me the photograph of his grandchild and we had agreed to work together to make sure they inherited a peaceful future. Now we had weathered our toughest crisis yet and the bonds had held. But Dai couldn’t resist venting. He told me we had made a big mistake in trusting Chen, who he said was a manipulative criminal. Then he implored me not to raise the episode when I saw President Hu and Premier Wen later in the week. We both agreed it was time to refocus on the urgent strategic concerns of the summit, from North Korea to Iran.
Across town a very different conversation was happening. The embassy staff had decided to give Chen and his wife some privacy after their long ordeal. Now that they were finally alone in the hospital room, the dissident and his family began second-guessing the choice he had made. After so much mistreatment, how could they trust the Chinese authorities to honor the deal? To Chen, the grand idea of staying in China and remaining relevant, despite the risks, may have started to seem less attractive once he was outside the protection of the embassy walls and with the loved ones he could potentially be endangering. He also spoke on the phone with friends in the human rights community worried about his safety, who urged him to get out of the country, and with reporters who questioned his decision to stay in China. As the evening went on, his answers started to change.
Back at the Wanshousi Temple, troubling press reports starting popping up on my colleagues’ BlackBerrys. By the time I emerged from my meeting with Dai, it was clear something had gone wrong. Journalists were quoting Chen from his hospital bed saying he “no longer felt safe,” that the Americans had abandoned him, and that he had changed his mind about remaining in China. He even denied that he had ever said he wanted to kiss me! (He later admitted to the press that “he was embarrassed by having spoken so intimately” to me.) Our carefully constructed choreography was falling apart.
When we arrived back at the hotel I convened an emergency meeting in my suite. While Chen seemed to be talking easily with every reporter and activist from Beijing to Washington, no one at the embassy could reach him on the cell phones that, ironically, we had provided. We hadn’t heard anything official yet from the Chinese, but they were reading the same reports we were, and security outside the hospital was growing by the hour. I could just imagine Dai and Cui preparing to deliver an epic “I told you so.”
Kurt gallantly offered me his resignation if things kept getting worse. I dismissed that out of hand and said we needed to start working on a revised plan. First we would put out a statement right away clarifying that, contrary to some of the breathless news reports, Chen had never asked for asylum and had certainly never been denied. Second, if in the morning Chen was still insisting that he wanted to go to the United States, we had to find a way to reengage the Chinese government, no matter how difficult and painful that would be, and negotiate a new deal. We couldn’t afford to let this issue fester in public and overwhelm the summit. Third, I would carry on with the scheduled Strategic and Economic Dialogue events as if nothing had happened, in keeping with my understanding with Dai. With their marching orders in hand, my troops filed out of the suite looking worried and beyond tired. None of us would sleep much that night.
The next day was a surreal exercise in diplomatic multitasking. Thanks to elaborate measures the government had taken in advance of the summit, the normally clogged streets and polluted air of Beijing were clearer than normal as our motorcade sped through the city that morning. But the road ahead was far from clear. A lot was riding on the next few hours.
We arrived at Diaoyutai, the sprawling complex of traditional guesthouses, gardens, and meeting rooms. It was here in 1971 that Henry Kissinger first negotiated with Zhou Enlai, laying the groundwork for President Nixon’s historic visit, normalization, and everything that followed. It was also here, during our 2010 meetings, that an intemperate outburst by a Chinese admiral had exposed the deep rifts of mistrust that still divide our countries. I wondered, given the current predicament, which of those two spirits our Chinese hosts would be channeling.
The answer came as soon as the first formal speeches began. Dai and the other Chinese leaders were clearly working just as hard as Tim Geithner and I were to project a sense of normalcy and calm. They repeated their standard talking points about China’s harmonious rise and the importance of other countries staying out of their internal affairs—statements that, while familiar, took on a bit more edge in light of recent events. When it was my turn, I avoided the Chen issue and focused on Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the long list of other challenges on which we needed Chinese cooperation. But, I added, “a China that protects the rights of all its citizens will be a stronger and more prosperous nation, and of course, a stronger partner on behalf of our common goals.” That was as close as I got that morning to the current crisis.
Following the speeches, we moved into smaller groups to dive into the agenda in more detail. Even if our minds often wandered to the drama unfolding in a hospital room across town, this was a chance to work on important business, and we couldn’t afford to waste it. So I sat through hours of presentations and discussions, asking questions and raising concerns.
Kurt, meanwhile, was constantly excusing himself so he could monitor developments with Chen. The news wasn’t good. The embassy still couldn’t get through to his cell phone, and the Chinese were limiting physical access to the hospital. Protesters popped up outside, some wearing Chen-style dark glasses in homage to their hero, and Chinese security was getting increasingly anxious. None of that, however, was stopping Chen from talking with American journalists, who kept trumpeting his new desire to leave China and go to the United States and questioning whether we had done enough to help him.
Back home, with election-year politics swirling, Washington was in an uproar. Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner proclaimed himself “deeply disturbed” by reports that Chen was “pressured to leave the U.S. embassy against his will amid flimsy promises and possible threats of harm to his family.” Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, the Republican Presidential candidate, went even further. He said it was “a dark day for freedom” and “a day of shame for the Obama Administration.” I don’t know if the critics were aware that we had done what Chen said he wanted every step of the way. The White House went into full damage-control mode. The guidance to us in Beijing was simple: Fix this.
I told Kurt and Ambassador Locke to restart negotiations with Cui immediately and try to get Chen out of the country. That was easier said than done. The Chinese were absolutely incredulous that we would seek to reopen a deal that they hadn’t wanted in the first place. Cui just shook his head. He said that Kurt should “go back to Washington and resign.” Meanwhile Chen took his outreach to another level. Although he still had not spoken with anyone at the U.S. Embassy, he managed to call in to a Congressional hearing back in Washington. An activist close to Chen, Bob Fu, put his iPhone on speaker in front of Congressman Chris Smith’s committee. “I fear for my family’s lives,” Chen said, and then repeated his request to travel to the United States. It was like throwing fuel on the political fire.
It was time for me to step in. If Cui refused to negotiate, I would put aside the pantomime and raise the issue directly with Dai. Would our years of relationship-building pay off? On Friday I was scheduled to meet with President Hu and Premier Wen in the Great Hall of the People, and it was important to both Dai and me that those encounters go smoothly. It was in both our interests to get this resolved.
On the morning of May 4, I met with Dai and thanked him for China honoring its side of the agreement. Then I explained the political firestorm back home and the difficulties it was causing us. Dai seemed surprised as I described the circus at the Congressional hearing. Nothing like that ever happened in China. What to do now? I offered what I hoped would be a face-saving solution. In the original understanding, Chen was supposed to go to school in China for a period of time and then continue his studies at an American university. Moving up that timetable wouldn’t mean a whole new deal; it would simply be a refinement of the existing agreement. Dai stared at me quietly for a long while, and I wondered what thoughts were racing behind his stoic demeanor. Slowly he turned to Cui, who was visibly agitated, and directed him to try to work out the details with Kurt.
Heartened, but not yet confident, I headed off to the Great Hall of the People for my meetings with the senior leaders. True to my word, I did not raise Chen with Hu or later with Wen. I didn’t need to. In our discussions they appeared distracted but pleasant. We mostly talked in circles, dancing around the big issues facing the future of our relationship, while our aides were scurrying around trying to find a way out of our common dilemma. Hu and Wen were coming to the end of their ten-year term, and we too were headed into an election that could reshape our own government. But even if the players changed, the game would remain fundamentally the same.
I left the Great Hall of the People and crossed Tiananmen Square to the National Museum of China for a dialogue about educational and cultural exchanges with State Councilor Liu Yandong, the highest-ranking woman in the Chinese government. The daughter of a former Vice Minister of Agriculture with deep ties in the Communist Party, Madame Liu rose to become one of only two women to hold a seat in the politburo. We had developed a warm relationship over the years, and I was glad to see a friendly face at a tense time.
Beijing’s National Museum is enormous, designed to rival the Great Hall across the square, but its collection has never fully recovered from the removal of many of China’s most precious art and artifacts to Taiwan by the retreating forces of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in 1948. That’s the kind of wound to national pride that takes a long time to heal. As we walked up the soaring front steps, Kurt turned to me and asked, “Do you feel like we’ve done the right thing?” It was a reasonable question after so much high-stakes diplomacy and nerve-wracking twists and turns. I looked back at him and said, “There are a lot of decisions I make in this job that give me a pit in my stomach. I don’t have any of that here. This is a small price to pay to be the United States of America.” It was what Kurt needed to hear, and it happened to be the truth.
Inside the museum we were met by a large group of Chinese and American children waving flags and offering greetings. Upstairs a chorus of Chinese and American students sang two songs of welcome, one in English, the other in Mandarin. Finally two exchange students stepped forward to speak about their experiences studying abroad. An articulate young Chinese woman talked in English about living in New York, an eye-opening, horizon-expanding, ambition-inspiring journey into an America she had only read about. The young American man was just as eloquent, describing his studies in China in Mandarin and how it had helped him better understand the relationship between our two countries.
Occasionally, amid all the diplomatic pomp and circumstance of these summits, with their prepared speeches and choreographed set pieces, an actual human moment breaks through and reminds us of what we’re doing there in the first place. This was one of those moments. Listening to the students express so much empathy and excitement, I thought about all the effort we had put into what some critics dismiss as the “softer” side of diplomacy: the educational exchanges, cultural tours, and scientific collaboration. I had made it a priority to send more American students to China, with the goal of 100,000 over four years, in part because I believed it would help convince wary Chinese officials that we were serious about expanding engagement with them. These programs may garner few headlines, but they have the potential to influence the next generation of U.S. and Chinese leaders in a way no other initiative can match. If these students were any indication, it was working. I looked across the table at Liu, Cui, and the others, and I knew they could feel it too.
When Cui sat down with Kurt and his team after lunch to work out the next moves in the Chen drama, his tone was noticeably different. Despite our differences, we were working together to save the relationship and the future those two students represented. Afterward Kurt and Jake raced to put down on paper a short and carefully worded statement that would not acknowledge an explicit deal but would make it clear that an understanding had been reached. Chen, as a Chinese citizen in good standing, would apply for a visa to the United States, and it would be processed expeditiously by both sides. He could then take his family and begin his studies at New York University.
Back at Diaoyutai, Tim Geithner and I joined our counterparts onstage for the closing public remarks of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue. In my comments I reviewed the substantive ground that had been covered over the past few days. I noted that there had been a number of strong disagreements, but that four years of hard work had allowed us to develop a level of trust durable enough to withstand disruptions and distractions. I quoted a bit of Taoist wisdom that roughly translates as “To lead, one must see the larger picture.” We had tried to do that in this crisis and not lose sight of either the strategic concerns or our core values. Looking ahead, I told the audience, “We need to build a resilient relationship that allows both of us to thrive and meet our regional and global responsibilities without unhealthy competition, rivalry, or conflict. Zero-sum thinking will lead only to negative-sum results.”
As a rule Chinese leaders refuse to take questions at these closing “press conferences,” so after the formal statements, Tim Geithner and I drove back to our hotel for our first proper session with the world media since arriving in Beijing. The first question, from Matt Lee of the Associated Press, was predictable. “Madam Secretary, it won’t surprise you, I think, to get the questions that you’re about to get from me, which all have to do with the elephant in the room that’s been dogging us,” he began. I smiled at his mixed metaphor: “The elephant that has been dogging us. That’s good—a good start, Matt.” Laughter broke the tension in the room, just a bit. He pressed ahead: “How did the Chinese officials that you spoke to, the senior leadership, respond to your appeals on [Chen’s] behalf? Are you confident that they will allow him to leave the country to go to the States with his family so that he can study? And how do you respond to critics at home and elsewhere who say that the administration has really bungled this?”
It was finally time to put this drama to rest once and for all. I began with the carefully prepared text we had agreed to with the Chinese and then added a few thoughts of my own:
Let me start by saying that from the beginning, all of our efforts with Mr. Chen have been guided by his choices and our values. And I’m pleased that today our ambassador has spoken with him again, our Embassy staff and our doctor had a chance to meet with him, and he confirms that he and his family now want to go to the United States so he can pursue his studies. In that regard, we are also encouraged by the official statement issued today by the Chinese Government confirming that he can apply to travel abroad for this purpose. Over the course of the day, progress has been made to help him have the future that he wants, and we will be staying in touch with him as this process moves forward. But let me also add, this is not just about well-known activists. It’s about the human rights and aspirations of more than a billion people here in China and billions more around the world. And it’s about the future of this great nation and all nations. We will continue engaging with the Chinese Government at the highest levels in putting these concerns at the heart of our diplomacy.
As the cameras snapped away and the reporters scribbled in their notebooks, I felt good about this resolution. After the press conference I invited my team to a well-deserved celebratory dinner of Peking duck and other Chinese delicacies. Kurt and Harold recounted some of their more absurd misadventures over the past week, and we finally felt comfortable relaxing and laughing. The next day, I headed to the airport and boarded a flight to Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Chen was still in his hospital room, and we all knew there was a real chance this second deal would unravel just like the first. None of us would be truly comfortable until he was safely on American soil. Based on the understanding with the Chinese, that could take a number of weeks. But the Chinese had held up their side of the bargain throughout the crisis, and I believed they would do so again. Sure enough, on May 19 Chen and his family arrived in the United States to begin his fellowship at New York University.
I was immensely proud of my team and everyone at the embassy in Beijing. This was about much more than one man. We had spent four years preparing for a crisis like this—building up the Strategic and Economic Dialogue and other diplomatic mechanisms, developing habits of trust between counterparts up and down the chain, grounding the U.S.-China relationship in a framework of mutual interest and respect, while also staking out clear markers about human rights and democratic values. It had been a delicate tightrope walk from the start, but now I felt we had proof that it had been worth it. We also had reason to believe our relationship was strong enough to withstand future crises. Given our different visions, values, and interests, they were inevitable.
One of the primary goals of the pivot plan was to increase our active involvement in Asian affairs in a way that advanced our interests in a more open democratic and prosperous region, without weakening our efforts to build a positive relationship with China. The frictions in our relationship are a reflection of both disagreements over the issues at hand and very different perceptions of how the world, or at least Asia, should work. The United States wants a future of shared prosperity and shared responsibilities for peace and security. The only way to build that future is to develop mechanisms for and habits of cooperation and to urge China toward greater openness and freedom. That’s why we oppose China’s suppression of internet freedom, political activists like Chen, and the Tibetan and Uighur Muslim minorities. It’s why we want peaceful resolutions between China and its neighbors over their territorial claims.
The Chinese believe we don’t appreciate how far they’ve come and how much they’ve changed, or how deep and constant is their fear of internal conflicts and disintegration. They resent criticism by outsiders. They claim the Chinese people are more free than they have ever been, free to work, to move, to save and accumulate wealth. They are rightly proud of moving more people out of poverty faster than any other nation in history. They believe our relationship should be formed on mutual self-interest and noninvolvement in each other’s affairs.
When we disagree, they believe it’s because we fear China’s rise on the world stage and want to contain it. We believe disagreement is a normal part of our relationship and think if we can manage our differences it will strengthen our cooperation. We have no interest in containing China. But we do insist that China play by the rules that bind all nations.
In other words, the jury’s still out. China has some hard choices to make, and so do we. We should follow a time-tested strategy: Work for the best outcome, but plan for something less. And stick to our values. As I told Kurt and Jake on that first tense night when Chen was pleading for refuge, our defense of universal human rights is one of America’s greatest sources of strength. The image of Chen, blind and injured, seeking through that dangerous night for the one place he knew stood for freedom and opportunity—the embassy of the United States—reminds us of our responsibility to make sure our country remains the beacon for dissidents and dreamers all over the world.