As the powerful Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chief of Guangdong Province waited in an ornate conference room last week for the arrival of new US Ambassador Gary Locke (駱家輝), the banter with his aides naturally turned to Locke’s Chinese roots. Locke had stopped in Guangzhou to talk to the party chief, Wang Yang (汪洋), en route to a visit to his ancestral village.
Wang put a quick end to that topic.
“He’s no hometown folk,” he told aides as they shifted in a reception line. “He should clearly realize he is an American.”
Just a few months ago, several Chinese media outlets were offering Locke as a role model for China’s stuffy political leaders — a US bigwig who flew economy class and shunned having a retinue of underlings, like those who attend to the needs of politicians here.
As Wang’s remark suggests, those days are over. Propaganda authorities, apparently worried that Locke makes Chinese leaders look out of touch, have imposed restrictions on media coverage of Locke, the former two-term governor of Washington state and US secretary of commerce, and the first Chinese-American ambassador to China.
Some news organizations have even suggested in commentaries that his man-of-the-people style is an act, a US plot to stir citizens’ resentment of their own leaders.
Two Chinese journalists covering Locke’s visit last week to Guangzhou and his ancestral village said propaganda officials had issued a directive not to “hype” the trip. That meant that they would write straightforward articles of about 1,000 Chinese characters and that their work would be kept off newspaper front pages.
“They don’t like him,” one reporter, who insisted on anonymity, said of the propaganda authorities. “They think he is too high-profile and he is embarrassing Chinese leaders.”
However, somehow, the word has not gotten to ordinary Chinese.
As Locke traveled on Nov. 4 to his ancestral village, Jilong, a cluster of gray-brick homes two-and-a-half hours from the provincial capital, hundreds of people gathered on the streets of the city of Taishan, to watch as he stopped at a local kindergarten and — if they were lucky — to have their picture taken with him.
Locke was typically obliging about posing for snapshots.
“He likes to be with common people,” Wu Qiang, a 35-year-old factory worker, said as he waited patiently for the ambassador’s motorcade. “He has Chinese blood, but American characteristics.”
Taishan, a spawning ground for hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants to the US, seems to be the rule, not the exception. Three months into Locke’s tenure in China, his popularity among the masses separates him from his predecessors.
His immediate predecessor, Jon Huntsman Jr, although steeped in China policy and, unlike Locke, able to converse in Mandarin, never generated such hoopla. Nor did those before him.
As Locke touched down in Beijing in August, Chinese microblogs were buzzing with reports about how he had bought his own coffee, carried his own backpack, hauled his own luggage and traveled in an ordinary vehicle instead of a limousine.
Ordinary Chinese continue to be fascinated by reports of Locke and his family waiting in line for an hour to catch a cable car while visiting the Great Wall or flying economy class. Coach plane travel, the ambassador has repeatedly explained, is US government policy.
In no small part, Chinese are riveted — and proud — that one of their own has joined the ranks of the powerful in a nation they still regard with respect. Locke makes the most of this anyone-can-succeed-in-America narrative.
His grandfather left Jilong Village for the US in the 1880s, washing dishes and mopping floors in exchange for English lessons, and brought his children and relatives over to the US one by one. Locke says his father, who immigrated at age 12 or 13, worked every day of the year and taught him respect for family, education and hard work.
One of Gary Locke’s best speech lines, delivered in Guangzhou to applause, is that it took the Locke family 100 years to move one mile, from the house where his grandfather toiled as a servant to the Washington governor’s Georgian-style mansion.
Truth be told, Locke could play the part of a Chinese leader, one with graying temples, and some might say, a sharper haircut. However, in a nation where political fortunes are almost exclusively determined in secret deliberations, Locke’s career trajectory is prototypically American — and to some, an implicit rebuff to Beijing’s assertions that the Chinese masses are not ready for democracy.
Locke says he draws from both cultures. In China, he said early this month, he hopes to show that “Americans are very easygoing people.”
“If the added attention and great visibility that I have been able to generate can help open doors and expose more Chinese to American values and the American way of life, that is great,” he said.
However, while his ordinary-folks image has gone down well with many Chinese, the state-run news media have at times been lacerating.
China Daily, a state-run English-language newspaper, at first applauded his Everyman image, saying: “Perhaps it is time for Chinese dignitaries to follow the example of humble Locke.”
However, Guangming Daily, an influential CCP newspaper, charged that Locke’s appointment “reveals the despicable intention of the United States to use a Chinese to control the Chinese and incite political chaos in China.”
The English-language edition of Global Times, a nationalistic party newspaper, advised Locke to stick to policy and not pretend to be “a mirror” for Chinese officials.
“A U.S. ambassador becoming a political star in China cannot be interpreted as U.S. respect for China,” a September editorial chided.
Locke’s visit last week drew a generally cautious response from the official news media. Jiangmen Daily, a small local newspaper, ran a question-and-answer article with the ambassador, as well as a front-page article on his visit. However, the Saturday edition of Guangzhou Daily, a CCP-run publication that reaches far more readers, devoted a mere 620 characters on page 10 to Locke.
While China News Service, a government-owned news agency, provided some coverage, the bigger and more influential outlets, like the official Xinhua news service, stayed away.
This week, an op-ed article in Global Times suggested that Locke had acted improperly in 2003 when, as governor of Washington, he visited a Chinese company that had formed a partnership with his in-laws. By contrast, the article said, China appoints only “pure” ambassadors with no conflicts of interest.
US embassy spokesman Richard Buangan said Locke had no financial interest in the partnership and never advocated on its behalf.
Chinese propaganda authorities have long dictated news coverage of foreign diplomats and visiting dignitaries, tuning reports to meet government purposes. If he is now a target, Locke said, it is of no concern to him.
“I don’t know what is in the mind of the government’s newspapers,” he said. “I am not here to make a statement about the lifestyle of Chinese leaders.”
Nonetheless, he does. Headed back to Beijing the other weekend, Locke sauntered to the back of the plane to chat with a reporter. So many passengers got up to snap photos that the ambassador was forced to return to his seat in the first row of economy class so others would sit down and let the plane take off.
Disappointed, one passenger pleaded with the reporter to summon Locke back.
“Chinese officials are VIPs,” said the man, who asked for anonymity because his job is government-related. “There is a great fervor about him because of what he represents.”
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