BY TOM PLATE
Stumped by Trump? Horrified by
Hillary? Apprehensive about America?
As a therapeutic aid, dear distinguished reader, this column
proposes to examine - and even appreciate - a totally different style of public
leadership: the low-key. Yes, that kind.
Remember the old days?
Remember Hu Jintao, the predecessor to China’s current maximum leader Xi
Jinping? The uber-quiet Hu was widely assessed as so low-key as to not even
require a key chain. But maybe second thoughts are in order about this whole
business of political peacocks the strut their stuff even if they don't have
any.
Let’s start with
a little insight from the late, great American writer E.B. White, in his touching
tale The Trumpet of the Swan (1970): “‘All [trumpteer] swans are vain,' explained
the cob. 'It is right for swans to feel proud, graceful—that's what swans are
for’.”
Now apply
this to the less graceful world of politics - as in: ‘All politicians are vain, but it is right for them to feel proud
– that’s what politicians are for.” Like swans, perhaps we might say, politicians
when they are in full crowing, obnoxious mode are simply being true to
themselves. Expecting a political figure to be humble, as for a swan not to be
vain, is to fight the nature of things.
And
so this year, as almost everyone in the world knows, a bevy of American
trumpeter swans have been winging their way toward The White House. Last week, one
of the last still wedging forward - Hillary Clinton – did a sort of politician’s
swan dive from the heights of serious public policy to honk back at Donald
Trump’s many prior public insults.
Originally billed as a foreign policy address, the speech was anything
but. Many pro-Hillary commentators and her outright allies applauded, as in: This lady can honk with the worst of them!
Maybe,
but as we see it: really, there’s nobody that quite trumpets like The Don.
Perhaps all Clinton’s swan dive proved
is that birds of a political feather do flock together: In public politics, it
sometimes seems as if nothing is too vulgar. The Don has already denounced the
former U.S. secretary of state and First Lady as “crooked.” What could be a
worse charge than that?
Ah – there
is at least one other calumny of consequence, far worse than “crooked.” It is,
in today’s value system, the sin of being “colorless.”
Colorless
– we recall- is exactly what our hard-hearted, colorful Western media dubbed Hu
Jintao, who,
between 2002 and 2012, served as paramount leader of China – the Communist
Party’s General Secretary and the country’s president. This meant that for ten
years he was one of the two most powerful leaders on the face of the earth. But
the man got scant respect, at least in the West. A U.S. newsmagazine once dubbed him
“cautious, colorless and corporate ... the kind of guy you wouldn't think twice
about."
It’s time for a reappraisal of Hu’s true hue – and of ‘colorless’
politicians in general – in a re-calibration of leaders whose colorlessness might
simply hide (and even nurture?) a healthy measure of calm reflection. Maybe the
Hu Jintao style, reflecting collective leadership, was less inherently colorless
than properly cautious. “Colorful’ flares can trigger explosive flare-ups; a low-key,
stay-calm style can prevent relations from going off-key or gang-bang.
Here is one telling example: the little-known
story of President Hu’s state visit to the U.S. in January 2011. To almost everyone’s surprise and
relief - on both sides- it went quite well. For his part, China’s president returned home impressed by
the possibilities of reducing bilateral tensions and instructed the central government’s
Propaganda Department to tone down the anti-American stuff. That moment of good
feeling did not last forever, of course. But the story illustrates the point
that colorlessness is not necessarily the enemy of effectiveness. It might even
be a symptom of a statesmanship that values quiet results over prideful
flamboyance.
By
contrast, the current, successor administration in China is anything but
colorless. But all the pushing and shoving – rhetorical as well as naval, especially
by Beijing, but Washington, too (swan diving?)– can make one nostalgic for the
calming balm of calculated colorlessness. The escalating language over who owns
what in the South China Sea is producing new tension, triggering an Asian arms
race and coloring the very way America and China view each other.
As
the experienced and extremely knowledgeable Susan Shirk, now a University of
California professor, and former State Department star in the Bill Clinton
administration, once pointed out in a discussion on the US-China relationship:
“Over the past several years, Americans have noticed with apprehension a steady
drumbeat of [mainland] media messages about America’s supposed ‘containment’ of
China that have undoubtedly been officially encouraged. The precedents of
Germany and Japan show how this kind of commercialized semi-controlled media,
by creating myths and mobilizing anger against perceived foreign enemies, can
drag a country into war.”
China
is of course a nuclear power. The entire world would be better off, to be sure,
if the U.S. relinquished a substantial portion of its nuclear vanity and
compacted it down to China’s more modest arsenal. But for that day of disarmament-control
epiphany to ever come, considerably more mutual trust, reasoned discourse and
deft diplomacy will be needed.
That’s one good reason to leave open the possibility of appreciation of political
leaders that offer the calm of colorlessness rather than the trumpet of the Don.
The non-grandstanding Hu style has so much more to say for it than perhaps heretofore
acknowledged.
But you can always honk if you don't agree.
Columnist Tom Plate is a U.S. journalist, author
of the ‘Giants of Asia’ series, and Loyola Marymount University’s Distinguished
Scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies. This column first appeared on the op-ed page of the South China Morning Post of Hong King Tuesday 7 June 2016
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