With everyone else on the planet weighing in on Obama's visit to China last week, I didn't want to miss the party. I wrote a brief article for the website of the magazine Foreign Policy comparing Chinese and American press coverage of the visit. The title and blurb are theirs (the title is much better than mine, but I never used the phrase "Tricky Dick"), but the rest is all Imagethief, in somewhat mainstreamed form as this was written with the blessings of my employers.

Obama, the Great Wall, and Nixon’s Ghost

Not since Tricky Dick's historic 1972 trip to China has any U.S. president's visit been truly groundbreaking -- but both the U.S. and Chinese media strove to add drama to Obama's recent Beijing foray, in radically different ways.

State visits are all about harnessing symbolism. When Henry Kissinger went to China in 1971 to negotiate for Richard Nixon's historic visit, the Chinese agreed to time the announcement of the invitation so that the American press could hit their then-weekly news cycle. Nixon's visit the following year symbolized the end of more than 20 years of antagonism.

All subsequent U.S. presidents visiting China have struggled with Nixon's legacy. Some things have changed since 1972, not least the antediluvian idea of a weekly news cycle, but presidential visits to China remain more symbolic than substantive. Years of diplomatic spade work drive actual policy changes, leaving government communication offices, pundits, and journalists to construct a narrative from stage-managed vignettes, choreographed meetings, and turgid communiqués, or to pull odds and ends from the margins. Different agendas produce different narratives, and sometimes the real picture emerges from the totality of coverage, like a poster emerging from a mosaic of small photographs.

...read the rest at Foreign Policy.

I didn't get into why the American press coverage was the way it was. So, amongst the various post-mortems, you should read James Fallows' two posts (here and here) on that topic (citing some experienced China hands), and why much of the coverage was a disservice to the trip.

Word through the grapevine is that despite the standard-issue happy press coverage in Chinese media, reviews of the visit from inside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are not especially positive and that the Central Publicity Department (or Propaganda department, depending upon your mood) and state media are annoyed that the exlusive went to Southern Weekend (more on that issue from Jason Dean of the Wall Street Journal Beijing bureau here). Given the pretty hostile reviews in the US, it seems like it was a tough week for the president. Oh, well. Better luck when Mr. Hu goes to Washington, perhaps.

 

"Hey, Rahm, think a wall like this could keep the White House press corps away?"