At the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner a couple of years ago, the Chinese-American comedian Joe Wong, who has a Ph.D. in biochemistry, earned a standing ovation for some good-natured swipes at Vice-President Joe Biden, who was in black tie nearby. (In preparation for the gig, Wong told the crowd, he’d read Biden’s memoir. Beat. But compared to meeting him in person, “I think the book is much better.”)
Biden howled—and he may be surprised to hear that the memory of that reaction could serve him well this week, when he touches down on Wednesday in Beijing for an official visit. Anticipating his arrival, some Chinese commentators recalled the gig and gave the Vice-President high marks for laughing at himself, which, they point out, is not a trait widely shared by China’s top brass.
Humility has become a political object in China these days. The country has been slogging through a string of official scandals and missteps that hinge on the gnawing sense that the nation’s elite has imbibed too much of its own press. In a typical case that pinballed around the Chinese Web last spring, a bus in Hebei province carrying the mayor rushed through a red light and hit a fourteen-year-old student. The student was left disabled; the mayor skipped going to the hospital; Chinese commentators raged. More recently, a government spokesman speaking to reporters about a fatal train crash brushed aside questions about some specious assertions with a flip of the hand and a now-famous line: “Regardless of whether or not you believe it; either way, I believe it..”
Let’s face it: Biden arrives at the table with a weaker hand than he’d like. To Chinese leaders, the U.S. looks like a political basket-case and a dodgy debtor. But a political leader who is approachable, light-hearted, and self-deprecating is such a rare creature in Beijing these days that Biden—who will face students at a speech in the western city of Chengdu—could make his presence felt most effectively simply by being easygoing and unpretentious. A vice-president who took the train to work as a senator, and once bemoaned that his meager income ranked him as the second poorest member of Congress—could get some mileage out of that. While it has never been difficult to lure Biden off-script, he could do well recalling, as Howard Fineman once put it, that his political DNA is as a great street pol from Scranton—especially in a nation where leaders typically memorize every word of their remarks before taking the stage.
His new ambassador has even given him a head start. Over the weekend, newly arrived Amb. Gary Locke generated a minor frenzy on the Chinese Web by being photographed at a Starbucks in Seattle buying his own coffee and trying to pay for it with a coupon. Except for a few jokes about the U.S. being downgraded to a coupon-cutter, the reaction was glowing.
Photograph by Jim Greenhill, Flickr CC.