One of our most important tools for engaging with Vietnam was a proposed new trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which would link markets throughout Asia and the Americas, lowering trade barriers while raising standards on labor, the environment, and intellectual property. As President Obama explained, the goal of the TPP negotiations is to establish “a high standard, enforceable, meaningful trade agreement” that “is going to be incredibly powerful for American companies who, up until this point, have often been locked out of those markets.” It was also important for American workers, who would benefit from competing on a more level playing field. And it was a strategic initiative that would strengthen the position of the United States in Asia.
Our country has learned the hard way over the past several decades that globalization and the expansion of international trade brings costs as well as benefits. On the 2008 campaign trail, both then-Senator Obama and I had promised to pursue smarter, fairer trade agreements. Because TPP negotiations are still ongoing, it makes sense to reserve judgment until we can evaluate the final proposed agreement. It’s safe to say that the TPP won’t be perfect—no deal negotiated among a dozen countries ever will be—but its higher standards, if implemented and enforced, should benefit American businesses and workers.
Vietnam also stood to gain a lot from this deal—the TPP would cover a third of world trade—so its leaders were willing to make some reforms to reach an agreement. As negotiations gained momentum, other countries in the region felt the same way. The TPP became the signature economic pillar of our strategy in Asia, demonstrating the benefits of a rules-based order and greater cooperation with the United States.
On the afternoon of July 22, the ASEAN regional meetings began in Hanoi’s National Convention Center with long, formal discussions on trade, climate change, human trafficking, nuclear proliferation, North Korea, and Burma. But as the meetings stretched into the second day, there was one topic on everyone’s mind: the South China Sea. The territorial disputes, already fraught with history, nationalism, and economics, had become a crucial test question: Would China use its growing power to dominate an expanding sphere of influence, or would the region reaffirm international norms that bind even the strongest nations? Naval vessels were squaring off in contested waters, newspapers were whipping up nationalist sentiments across the region, and diplomats were scrambling to prevent open conflict. Yet China kept insisting this wasn’t an appropriate topic for a regional conference.
That night I gathered Kurt Campbell and my Asia team to review our plans for the next day. What we had in mind would require subtle diplomacy, calling on all the groundwork we had laid in the region over the past year and a half. We spent hours fine-tuning the statement I would make the next day and working out the choreography with our partners.
As soon as we started the ASEAN session, the drama began to build. Vietnam got the ball rolling. Despite China’s objections to discussing the South China Sea in this setting, Vietnam raised the contentious issue. Then, one by one, other Ministers expressed their concerns and called for a collaborative, multilateral approach to resolving territorial disputes. After two years of China’s flexing its muscles and asserting its dominance, the region was pushing back. When the moment was right, I signaled my intention to speak.
The United States would not take sides on any particular dispute, I said, but we supported the multilateral approach being proposed, in accordance with international law and without coercion or the threat of force. I urged the nations of the region to protect unfettered access to the South China Sea and to work toward developing a code of conduct that would prevent conflict. The United States was prepared to facilitate this process because we saw freedom of navigation in the South China Sea as a “national interest.” That was a carefully chosen phrase, answering the earlier Chinese assertion that its expansive territorial claims in the area constituted a “core interest.”
When I was finished, I could see that Chinese Foreign Minister Yang was livid. He asked for an hour-long break before coming back to deliver his response. Staring directly at me, he dismissed the disputes in the South China Sea and warned against outside interference. Looking at his Asian neighbors, he reminded them, “China is a big country. Bigger than any other countries here.” It was not a winning argument in that room.
The confrontation in Hanoi did not resolve the contests in the South and East China Seas; those remain active and dangerous as of this writing. But in subsequent years, diplomats in the region would point to that meeting as a tipping point, both in terms of American leadership in Asia and in the pushback against Chinese overreach.
As I headed back to Washington, I felt more confident about our strategy and position in Asia. When we started in 2009, many in the region doubted our commitment and our staying power. Some in China sought to take advantage of that perception. Our pivot strategy was designed to dispel those doubts. During one long discussion with Dai, he exclaimed, “Why don’t you ‘pivot’ out of here?” I had logged more miles and sat through more awkwardly translated diplomatic speeches than I imagined possible. But it paid off. We had climbed out of the hole we found ourselves in at the beginning of the administration and reasserted America’s presence in the region. The years that followed would bring new challenges, from a sudden leadership change in North Korea to a standoff with the Chinese over the fate of a blind human rights dissident hiding in the U.S. Embassy. There would be new opportunities as well. Flickers of progress in Burma would ignite a dramatic transformation and carry the promise of democracy into the heart of that formerly closed land. And thanks in part to our determined efforts to establish mutual trust and habits of cooperation, relations with China would prove more resilient than many dared hope.
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On the plane home from Hanoi, with my head still full of South China Sea drama, it was time to turn my attention to other urgent business. We were just over a week away from what would be one of the most important events in my life. The press was clamoring for information, and I had a lot of work to do to get ready. This time it wasn’t a high-level summit or a diplomatic crisis. It was my daughter’s wedding, a day I had been looking forward to for thirty years.
I was amused by how much attention Chelsea’s plans were getting, and not just in the United States. In Poland in early July, an interviewer had asked me how I was juggling preparations for the wedding while representing America as Secretary of State. “How can you cope with two quite different tasks, but both of them extremely serious?” he asked. And how serious a task it was! When Bill and I got married in 1975, the ceremony took place in front of a few friends and family in the living room of our little house in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I wore a lace-and-muslin Victorian dress I had found shopping with my mother the night before. Times had changed.
Chelsea and our soon-to-be son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky, planned an unforgettable weekend for their families and friends in Rhinebeck, New York. As mother of the bride, I was delighted to help in every way I could, including reviewing photographs of flower arrangements from the road and making time for tastings and dress selections back home. I felt lucky that my day job had prepared me for the elaborate diplomacy required to help plan a big wedding. I got such a kick out of it that I referred to myself as “MOTB” (mother of the bride) in a Mother’s Day email to all State Department staff, also a nod to a necklace Chelsea had given me for Christmas with those same letters. Now that Hanoi was behind me, I was eager to get back to all the last-minute details and decisions that awaited.
On Monday I spent most of the day at the White House, meeting with President Obama in the Oval Office and with the rest of the national security team in the Situation Room and visiting with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. I always enjoy seeing Ehud, and we were at another delicate moment for peace negotiations in the Middle East, but this time I couldn’t stop thinking about when I could leave and jump on a shuttle flight up to New York.
Th
e big day finally arrived on Saturday, July 31. Rhinebeck is a lovely town in the Hudson Valley with quaint shops and good restaurants, and it provided the perfect setting. Chelsea’s and Marc’s friends and family gathered at Astor Courts, an elegant Beaux Arts estate designed by the architect Stanford White for Jacob and Ava Astor around the turn of the century. Its indoor swimming pool, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt is said to have performed physical therapy for his polio, may have been the first built for a private home anywhere in America. After Jacob Astor went down with the Titanic, the house was passed from owner to owner and spent a number of years as a nursing home run by the Catholic Church. In 2008 it was restored to its original beauty.
Chelsea looked absolutely stunning, and watching her walk down the aisle with Bill, I couldn’t believe that the baby girl I had held in my arms for the first time on February 27, 1980, had grown into this beautiful and poised woman. Bill was as emotional as I was, maybe even more so, and I was just glad he made it down the aisle in one piece. Marc was beaming as Chelsea joined him under the chuppah, a canopy of willow branches and flowers that is part of the Jewish marriage tradition. The service was led by the Reverend William Shillady and Rabbi James Ponet, and they hit just the right note. Marc stepped on a glass, in keeping with Jewish tradition, and everyone cheered. Afterward Bill danced with Chelsea to “The Way You Look Tonight.” It was one of the happiest and proudest moments of my life.
So many thoughts went through my head. Our family had been through a lot together, good times and hard times, and now here we were, celebrating the best of times. I was especially glad that my mother had been able to see this day. She overcame a difficult childhood with very little love or support, and yet still figured out how to be a loving and caring mom to me and my brothers, Hugh and Tony. She and Chelsea shared a special bond, and I knew how much it meant to Chelsea to have her grandmother beside her as she planned her wedding and married Marc.
I thought about the future, and the life that Chelsea and Marc would build together. They had so many dreams and ambitions. This, I thought, is why Bill and I had worked so hard for so many years to help build a better world—so Chelsea could grow up safe and happy and one day have a family of her own, and so every other child would have the same chance. I remembered what Dai Bingguo had said to me when he pulled out the photograph of his granddaughter: “This is what we’re in it for.” It was our responsibility to find a way to work together to make sure our children and grandchildren inherited the world they deserved.
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Beijing: The Dissident
Shortly after I was confirmed as Secretary, a team of engineers descended on our home in northwest Washington. They installed a bright yellow secure telephone so that even at odd hours of the night, I could speak to the President or an Ambassador in some faraway embassy about sensitive topics. It was a constant reminder that the troubles of the world were never far from home.
At 9:36 on the night of Wednesday, April 25, 2012, the yellow phone rang. It was my Director of Policy Planning and Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan, calling from his own secure line on the seventh floor of the State Department, where he’d hastily returned from a rare night off. He told me that our embassy in Beijing faced an unexpected crisis and urgently needed direction.
Unbeknownst to us, less than a week earlier, a blind, forty-year-old human rights activist named Chen Guangcheng had escaped from house arrest in Shandong Province by climbing over the wall of his home. He broke his foot but managed to elude the local police assigned to watch him. Leaving his family behind, he set out on a journey hundreds of miles to Beijing with the help of a modern-day Underground Railroad of fellow dissidents and supporters. While in hiding in Beijing he made contact with a Foreign Service officer at the American Embassy who had long ties to the Chinese human rights community. She immediately recognized the seriousness of the situation.
Chen had gained notoriety in China as the “barefoot lawyer,” advocating for the rights of the disabled, helping rural villagers protest illegal land seizures by corrupt local authorities, and documenting abuses of the one-child policy such as forced sterilizations and abortions. Unlike many other high-profile Chinese dissidents, Chen was not a student at an elite university or an urban intellectual. He was a villager himself, poor and self-taught, and the public came to see him as a genuine man of the people. In 2005 he was arrested after filing a class-action lawsuit on behalf of thousands of victims of government repression. A local court sentenced him to fifty-one months in prison, supposedly for destroying property and obstructing traffic. It was a blunt miscarriage of justice, shocking even in a country with little rule of law. After serving out his full sentence, he was released into house arrest, surrounded by armed guards and cut off from the outside world.
Now he was injured, on the run, and asking for our help. At dawn in Beijing, two U.S. Embassy officers met in secret with Chen. With Chinese State Security hunting for him, he asked if he could take refuge at the embassy, at least long enough to receive medical attention and devise a new plan. They agreed to relay the request to Washington, where it quickly made its way up the chain. Chen continued to circle the Beijing suburbs in a car, waiting for a response.
A number of factors made this a particularly difficult decision. First there were the logistics. Chen had a broken foot and was a wanted man. If we didn’t act quickly, he would likely be captured. To make matters worse, Chinese security regularly maintained a robust presence outside our embassy. If Chen tried to walk up to the front door, they would surely seize him before we could even unbolt the lock. The only way to get him safely inside would be to send a team out into the streets to quietly pick him up. Bob Wang, our Deputy Chief of Mission in Beijing, estimated that Chen’s chances of getting in on his own were less than 10 percent. He thought it was above 90 percent if we went out and got him. That, however, would certainly increase tensions with the Chinese.
Timing was also a factor. As it happened, I was preparing to depart in five days for Beijing myself, to participate in the annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and our Chinese counterparts. It was the culmination of an entire year’s worth of painstaking diplomatic work, and we had a full agenda of important and sensitive issues, including tensions in the South China Sea, provocations from North Korea, and economic concerns like currency valuation and intellectual property theft. If we agreed to help Chen, there was a real chance that the Chinese leaders would be so angry they would cancel the summit. At the very least we could expect much less cooperation on matters of significant strategic importance.
It appeared that I had to decide between protecting one man, albeit a highly sympathetic and symbolic figure, and protecting our relationship with China. On one side of the scale were America’s core values and our status as a beacon of freedom and opportunity; on the other were many of our most urgent security and economic priorities.
As I weighed this decision, I thought of the dissidents who sought refuge in American Embassies in Communist countries during the Cold War. One of them, Cardinal József Mindszenty of Hungary, stayed for fifteen years. In 1989 Fang Lizhi and his wife, Li Shuxian, Chinese physicists and prominent activists during the protests in Tiananmen Square, spent nearly thirteen months in the embassy in Beijing before finally making it to the United States. This legacy hung over the Chen case from the beginning.
I also had in mind a much more recent incident. In February 2012, just two months earlier, a Chinese police chief named Wang Lijun walked into the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu, the capital of the southwestern province of Sichuan, looking for help. Until his fall from grace, Wang had been the right-hand man of Bo Xilai, the powerful Communist Party boss of a nearby province. Wang had helped Bo run a vast network of corruption and graft. He eventually claimed to have knowledge of a cover-up of the murder of a British businessman by Bo’s wife. Bo was a colorful figure and a rising star in the national Communist Par
ty, but his spectacular abuses of power, including the alleged wiretapping of President Hu Jintao, unnerved his elders in Beijing. They began investigating both Bo and Wang. Afraid that he would end up like the poisoned Brit, Wang fled to our consulate in Chengdu with a head full of stories.
While he was inside, security forces loyal to Bo surrounded the building. It was a tense moment. Wang Lijun was no human rights dissident, but we couldn’t just turn him over to the men outside; that would effectively have been a death sentence, and the cover-up would have continued. We also couldn’t keep him in the consulate forever. So after asking Wang what he wanted, we reached out to the central authorities in Beijing and suggested that he would voluntarily surrender into their custody if they would listen to his testimony. We had no idea how explosive his story would prove or how seriously Beijing would take it. We agreed to say nothing about the matter, and the Chinese were grateful for our discretion.
Soon the dominoes started to fall. Bo was removed from power, and his wife was convicted of murder. Even the tightest Chinese censorship couldn’t stop this from becoming an enormous scandal, and it shook confidence in the Communist Party’s leadership at a sensitive time. President Hu and Premier Wen were scheduled to hand over power to a new generation of leaders in early 2013. They badly wanted a smooth transition, not a national furor over official corruption and intrigue.
Hard Choices Page 11
