Hu Jintao’s move made U.S. officials look at each other in disbelief

On May 9, “the wire china,” an online magazine launched only last year, published an interview with Daniel R. Russel, former U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under Obama. In the interview, Russel reveals how the Chinese Communist Party’s top brass is all about appearances and pomp and circumstance.

Hu Jintao and Obama (Photo)

Russel helped the Obama administration formulate the “pivot towards Asia” and the “rebalancing” policy in Asia, and participated in almost all the high-level talks between the U.S. and China during the Obama era, and is familiar with the inside story of U.S.-China relations. He said the Chinese Communist Party is a Leninist party, particularly paranoid, and will only talk about peace when the U.S. demonstrates its strength, etc.

Russell mentioned that in the first two years after the 2008 financial crisis and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, he received information from China that the CCP became arrogant and arrogant (hubris and arrogance), with a bit of smugness and condescension, believing that the U.S. had become an emperor without clothes and that the financial crisis was the Western capitalist economy’s “fatal weakness” (clay feet). And China was riding out the storm and pulling the global economic train forward.

At the time, the U.S. and China had regular strategic and economic dialogues, and Russell dealt mainly with Dai Bingguo, Yang Jiechi and Cui Tiankai, while Chinese Communist Party officials read from a script and spoke at length.

Russell said talking to Hu Jintao was like talking to one of those animated presidents from Disney World, and it was really impossible to really communicate with him because it was just a bunch of talking points in suits and ties.

Russell said it was all too rare for Hu to deviate from the script. Once during the talks, Obama was harshly accusing the Chinese Communist Party on North Korea (kickingthesh*tout), and Hu Jintao responded very politely and carefully (mealy-mouthed), very uneasily, picking up a pencil and marking his notebook in front of us.

At the time, seeing this scene, Russell and his colleagues looked at each other in disbelief. Russell thought some of it had to do with personality, some of it had to do with his style of acting, and maybe with what he thought his role was.