"We will get along very well"

She came. She saw. She schmoozed it up with some Chinese dignitaries.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton seems to have hit all the right notes during her whirlwind trip to the Middle Kingdom.

She emphasized China's vital role in helping the global economy back onto its feet, while aggressively downplaying any suggestions of protectionism brought on by the watered-down-to-the-point-of-irrelevance "Buy American" clause in the latest stimulus package. Her suggestion that Americans and Chinese could trade financial traits, with the former saving more and the latter spending more, would be funny if it weren't kind of sad.

She urged the Chinese government to take a leading role in combating climate change, tackling head-on the claim that China's just industrializing the same way the U.S. and Europe did way back on the late 19th century--in an extremely unsustainable manner.

“When we were industrializing and growing, we didn’t know any better; neither did Europe,” she said during a visit to a geothermal power plant. “Now we’re smart enough to figure out how to have the right kind of growth.”

Well, uh, I might debate that last point. But whatever; I'm sure the people giving Hillary her tour were just glad she wasn't touring nearby Tianjin's factories, or testing Beijing's air quality.

China has been under a lot of pressure to clean up its environmental act, and despite continuing protestations that the rest of the world is just a big bully and should pay attention to its own dirty power and overflowing landfills, the government until recently had been doing a lot to highlight its any and all attempts to "green" construction, manufacturing and transportation. Of course that all has changed thanks to the jinrong weiji, which took environmental concerns off the table to replace them with the overarching, panicked imperative to keep the economy churning at as fast a pace as possible.

Although stimulus plans in Canada and the U.S. have made environmental initiatives a priority, China's government has focused on infrastructure, lending and gettings its population to buy something--anything. Less reusing and recycling, more consumption, dammit!

But anyway.

More significant is what wasn't mentioned during Clinton's visit--namely, human rights concerns. A hypersensitive issue in China at the best of times, the minggan factor grew exponentially given the timing--months before the 20th anniversary of the infamous Tian'anmen Square massacre and a few short weeks before the 50th anniversary of a massive uprising in Tibet.

Recently, China underwent its first UN Human Rights Council review. It was awkward.

China got kudos for its success in reducing poverty, and breathless requests for advice from the Philippines, Algeria, Vietnam and Malaysia as to how they could do the same.

But Zhongguo's dignitaries were unimpressed by persnickety questions from the Canuck and Aussie camps: What about those alleged arbitrary detentions of Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongols and Falun Gong? When is China going to publish a list of annual executions and set up an independent human rights institution?

Requests like these "did not enjoy the support of China."

Oh, snap.

The U.S. didn't say much then, and its emissary didn't say much this weekend.

Phew.




Clip courtesy of AP and China TV. Not YouTube because mYouTube here is a stinking pile of melamine.