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Which Hillary Clinton will show up?
From a number of perspectives, personal as well as political, William Jefferson Clinton would be the first to volunteer the following: You will underestimate our tough, outspoken, new Secretary of State, now touring a quartet of Asian capitals, at your peril
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From a number of perspectives, personal as well as political, William Jefferson Clinton would be the first to volunteer the following: You will underestimate our tough, outspoken, new Secretary of State, now touring a quartet of Asian capitals, at your peril.
He knows.
So don't be misled by the smiley-face veneer to US foreign policy. It is true that the former First Lady of the United States is under clear instruction from her boss, President Barack Hussein Obama, to emphasize negotiation over confrontation, listening over lecturing, understanding rather than condemning, nuancing rather than scolding. What's wanted is a kinder, gentler foreign-policy packaging that's notably different from the steel wool of the last eight years.
But Asia is likely to find in Hillary Rodham Clinton one tough political customer who, after all, would have won her party's nomination for the Presidency, and may well have trounced the Republicans too, save for the impossible impediment of having to face the most exceptionally gifted domestic politician to come along since . well . her husband Bill.
Losing to Obama is thus no disgrace, as US Sen. John McCain can attest. But to undermine her reputation as a tough policy wonk with personal and professional ideals - in public, while on diplomatic tour - would not be the Hillary with which many Americans are quite familiar.
Take, for example, her two days in China due at week's end, after important stops in South Korea, Indonesia and Japan (the first stop). Put the China weekend on a Sparks-Might-Fly Watch.
China, for one, well appreciates that serious attention must be paid to this new Secretary of State. She is an American woman, very well educated, who knows her stuff, including women's rights issues. The Chinese painfully recall her in-your-Commie-face speech in 1995 at the 4th World Conference of Women, in Beijing. Clinton lambasted pretty much every other national government under the sun for various serious rights abuses against women, especially China, the conference host (weren't they sorry!).
"It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights," the then First Lady said, adding: "It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls ." This meant China's one-baby per family policy.
Admirers of that forthright, heartfelt speech hold it up as a stellar statement of a bottom-line human-rights principle (indeed, for years I used to play a videotape of it in my university classes, eager to elicit reaction from students who, hemmed in by the parochial US mass media, had never heard anything about it. Students love it). But for the Chinese government, that issue was uncomfortable for both its message and the way the message was conveyed (i.e., American blunt).
Eight years later, when Clinton's best-selling autobiography was published, it sold very well in China, too. But certain passages had been mysteriously censored in the process of translation into the mainland edition.
Among them was the author's reference to the fiery 1995 women's rights speech, of which the then First Lady was understandably proud, and women and feminists throughout the world in awe. Clinton thus knows from personal experience that when crossed - and publicly criticized - the Chinese government can become cranky, sulky and huffy.
In the current circumstance, they certainly would have preferred - but of course would never say publicly - the election of the Republican candidate. The Bush administration had generally followed a policy of emphasizing economic policy over all other issues with China (especially human-rights). This approach could be properly characterized as imminently sensible, though not hugely courageous.
By contrast, raising human-rights issues in China - whether privately or publicly - can arguably be described as courageous, but it is not very sensible. The Chinese government will make token concessions - release a dissident here and there, and so forth - but at the core of its being is the almost subconscious conviction that loosening up, Western style, will lead to domestic instability, big-time Tiananmen style.
That nervous twitch at China's top is more obvious than ever these days. The current economic turmoil has exacerbated unemployment in China. Even a one-percent hike in the number of people milling around and looking for jobs in that country is more than the total population of many entire countries.
If Hillary as Secretary of State raises the kind of issues so eloquently articulated in 1995, the Chinese elite may begin to wonder whether China lost the US President election. Cries of *Bring Back Condoleezza Rice' may not exactly reverberate around Tiananmen Square. But you get the idea.
By not forcefully mentioning those issues, Hillary Rodham Clinton may be doing her job, but at the same time she may be shrinking her feminist soul. Hers are tough and possibly uncomfortable two-inch pumps to be in.
Syndicated columnist and veteran journalist Tom Plate, a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, was the author, with wife Andrea Darvi Plate, of Secret Police, a book about governmental rights repression worldwide. c 2009, Pacific Perspective Media Center.
