When U.S. Diplomats Visit China, Meal Choices Are About More Than Taste Buds

 Visits to China by American officials like Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken can bring fame to local restaurants, as well as scrutiny to the dignitaries.

Beijing beer made with American hops, to highlight the trade relationship between the two countries. Tibetan food, to send a human rights message. Mushrooms with possible hallucinogenic properties, just because they taste good.

Where, what and how American dignitaries eat when they visit China is a serious matter. Choices of restaurants and dishes are rife with opportunities for geopolitical symbolism, as well as controversy and mockery. Chopstick skills — or a lack thereof — can be a sign of cultural competence or illiteracy.

An exorbitantly expensive meal can make an official look out of touch. Too cheap or informal, and you risk appearing undignified. Authenticity, history, cooking technique and taste can all affect the perception of a meal choice.

When Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken started a trip through China on Wednesday, part of the Biden administration’s efforts to stabilize the relationship between the two countries, some on Chinese social media wondered whether he would have time on his visit to stop and try some of the city’s famous xiaolongbao (soup dumplings).

One recommendation that he do so came with something of a political warning: “Eating xiaolongbao is just like handling international relations,” a commentator wrote on Weibo. “If your attention slips even a little, you’ll burn your mouth.”

Mr. Blinken did in fact visit a renowned soup dumpling restaurant that night. It’s unclear how much he considered the symbolism of his dumplings, but by indulging in a traditional popular snack, and by attending a basketball game, the optics suggested there was a more cordial spirit than on the trip he made last year, soon after a Chinese spy balloon drifting across the United States had heightened tensions.

But Mr. Blinken’s eating habits have drawn far less interest than that of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Over two trips, this month and last year, her meals in China attracted so much attention that the state-run Global Times deemed it a form of “food diplomacy.”

Last year, Ms. Yellen made headlines when, at a restaurant in Beijing serving cuisine from Yunnan Province, she ate mushrooms that were revealed to be mildly toxic and could cause hallucinations if not cooked properly.

Ms. Yellen later said that she was not aware of the mushrooms’ potential hallucinogenic properties when she ate them and felt no abnormal effects. Still, the story sparked a brief craze for the mushrooms in China.

This month, during a four-day trip to China, Ms. Yellen visited a famed Cantonese restaurant in Guangzhou, and a Sichuan restaurant in Beijing. The dishes she ordered were quickly posted online, drawing broad approval from commenters for the variety and affordability of the dishes ordered, her chopstick skills and the fact that she and her team sat among other diners instead of in a private room.

The dishes Ms. Yellen and her team ordered were classic meals from their respective regions and were not modified to foreign tastes, according to Fuchsia Dunlop, a London-based cook and food writer who specializes in Chinese cuisine.

“They haven’t chosen really expensive, show-off dishes and ingredients,” Ms. Dunlop said, speaking about the Sichuan meal. “This is very much what everyday people in Sichuan like to eat. This menu was chosen for flavor, not prestige.”

According to a Treasury Department spokeswoman, the department generally solicits suggestions from staff at the local embassy for restaurant recommendations when Ms. Yellen travels. Then, Ms. Yellen will research the restaurants herself and make the final decision.

On occasion, specific establishments will be chosen to convey a diplomatic message, the spokeswoman added. She cited Ms. Yellen’s visit this month to a brewery in Beijing that uses American hops, aimed to highlight the significance of American agricultural exports to China.

Some restaurants where Ms. Yellen has dined at have capitalized on her fame, like the Yunnan restaurant where she ate the mushrooms, which released a set menu based on what she ordered, called the “God of Money” menu, a nod to her position as Treasury Secretary. Ms. Yellen isn’t the first American dignitary to turn Chinese restaurants into overnight sensations. In 2011, a visit by then-Vice President Joe Biden to a Beijing noodle restaurant sent its business skyrocketing, according to Chinese state media, and led the restaurant to create a “Biden set” noodle menu. In 2014, after Michelle Obama visited a hot pot restaurant in the city of Chengdu, the restaurant said it would create an “American First Lady” set menu. Articles in Chinese media noted approvingly that Mrs. Obama was able to handle the spicy soup, which was not toned down for a foreign palate.

Her visit to a Tibetan restaurant in the same city, however, attracted controversy, and her staff at the time readily acknowledged that the venue had been chosen deliberately to show support for the rights and religious liberties of Tibetans in China.

But for Mrs. Obama’s husband and other U.S. presidents, Chinese cuisine served at official state banquets is often Americanized or customized to better suit a foreign palette.

In 2009, President Barack Obama was served a Chinese-style beef steak and baked fish, according to Chinese state media, and in 2017, President Trump ate dishes including kung pao chicken and stewed boneless beef in tomato sauce. Both meals finished with fruit ice cream, which is highly atypical of traditional Chinese meals.

But even those meals may hint at an international trend, Ms. Dunlop said. Mr. Obama’s menu contained “very safe, conservative choices that would be appealing to foreigners,” she said, while Mr. Trump’s menu was slightly more contemporary and showed off more Chinese cooking techniques.That shift, Ms. Dunlop said, “may reflect China feeling a bit more confident with Westerners’ familiarity with real Chinese food” in 2017 versus 2009.

Source Credit: NYT

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War in Ukraine Has China Cashing In

On China’s snowy border with Russia, a dealership that sells trucks has seen its sales double in the past year thanks to Russian customers. China’s exports to its neighbor are so strong that Chinese construction workers built warehouses and 20-story office towers at the border this summer.

The border town Heihe is a microcosm of China’s ever closer economic relationship with Russia. China is profiting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has led Russia to switch from the West to China for purchases of everything from cars to computer chips.

Russia, in turn, has sold oil and natural gas to China at deep discounts. Russian chocolates, sausages and other consumer goods have become plentiful in Chinese supermarkets. Trade between Russia and China surpassed $200 billion in the first 11 months of this year, a level the countries had not expected to reach until 2024. Russia’s war in Ukraine has also gotten an image boost from China. State media disseminates a steady diet of Russian propaganda in China and around the world. Russia is so popular in China that social media influencers flock to Harbin, the capital of China’s northernmost province in the east, Heilongjiang, to pose in Russian garb in front of a former Russian cathedral there. Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, and Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, have made numerous public demonstrations of the nations’ close ties. Mr. Xi visited Harbin in early September and declared Heilongjiang to be China’s “gateway to the north.” China’s exports to Russia soared 69 percent in the first 11 months of this year compared with the same period in 2021, before the invasion of Ukraine.

“Maintaining and developing China-Russian relations well is a strategic choice made by both sides on the basis of the fundamental interests of the two peoples,” Mr. Xi said as he met in Beijing on Wednesday with the Russian prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin. China has filled a critical import need for Russia, which many European and American companies shunned after Mr. Putin started his war in February 2022. China has pursued its role as a substitute supplier of goods despite risking its close economic ties with many European nations.

Before the Ukraine invasion, leaders of Germany, France and other European countries mostly set aside differences with China over issues like human rights to emphasize commerce. Chinese officials, for their part, insist that they should not be forced to choose between Europe and Russia, and that China should be free to do business with both.

The biggest winners for China from the surge in trade with Russia have been its vehicle manufacturers. On a recent afternoon in Heihe, lines of diesel freight trucks with decals of snarling bears, a symbol of Russia, on their drivers’ doors waited to be driven across an Amur River bridge to Russia. The bridge is new, and so are the trucks, which wore Genlyon badges, a brand that belongs to the state-owned Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation. The company, known as SAIC, also makes car brands like MG, acquired from Britain.

The sales helped China overtake Japan this year as the world’s largest car exporter. German manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz and BMW used to be strong sellers in Russia, but they have pulled out in response to sanctions on the country by Europe, the United States and their allies.

Sales of luxury cars in Russia have plunged, contributing to a decline in the overall size of the country’s car market, which is now less than half the size of Germany’s. But lower-middle-class and poor Russian families, whose members make up the bulk of the soldiers fighting the war, have stepped up purchases of affordable Chinese cars, according to Alexander Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. One reason, Mr. Gabuev said, are the death and disability payments that the Russian government and insurers are making to families of Russian soldiers — as much as $90,000 in the case of a death.

Russia has not released the number of its killed and wounded, but the United States estimates the total at 315,000.

Russians buy almost exclusively internal combustion cars. China has a surplus of them because its consumers have shifted swiftly to electric cars. And the land border means China can transport cars to Russia by rail, an important factor because China lacks its own fleet of transoceanic carrier ships for vehicle exports.

The result? Chinese carmakers have grabbed 55 percent of the Russian market, according to GlobalData Automotive. They had 8 percent in 2021.

“Never before have we seen automakers from a single country gobble up so much market share so quickly — the Chinese came into a windfall,” said Michael Dunne, an Asia automotive consultant in San Diego.

The United States has strongly warned China against sending armaments to Russia, and has not yet uncovered evidence that it is doing so. But some civilian equipment that China is selling to Russia, like drones and trucks, also has military uses.

Beijing’s embrace of Russia has also provided a modest but timely boon to China’s construction industry. The economy has struggled to heal from the scars left by almost three years of stringent “zero Covid” measures.

The real estate market is in crisis across China. Tens of millions of apartments are empty or unfinished, and new projects have stalled — depriving the construction sector of work that has long powered jobs.

“Many buildings have been built, but without anyone living inside,” said Zhang Yan, a wooden door vendor in Heihe. But some laborers are finding work on the 2,600-mile Russian border, which until this year had a dearth of truck stops, customs processing centers, rail yards, pipelines and other infrastructure. Construction moved ahead briskly over the summer in cities like Heihe, although it has paused for the frigid winter.

Pipelines are needed for one of the most crucial commodities traded between the two countries: energy.

Cheap Russian energy, bypassing sanctions imposed by the West, has helped Chinese factories compete in global markets even as their manufacturing rivals elsewhere, notably in Germany, have faced sharply higher energy costs for much of the past two years.

Russia has been ramping up natural gas shipments through its Power of Siberia pipeline to China, and has been negotiating to build a second one that would carry gas from fields that served Europe before the Ukraine war. China and Russia also agreed less than three weeks before the Ukraine war to build a third, smaller pipeline that would carry gas from easternmost Russia to northeastern China, and construction on that project has raced ahead.

The newest pipeline will cross land that Russia seized from China in the late 1850s and never returned. As recently as the 1960s, China and the Soviet Union were quarreling over the placement of their border and their troops skirmished. In a village near Heihe, a larger-than-life-size statue of an imperial Chinese general still glares across the Amur River.

Today Russia and China are building bridges and pipelines that cross it.

Source Credit: New York Times

Tibet avalanche kills 28 as search called off

 A rescue operation to find people trapped in an avalanche on a Tibetan highway has now ended, with Chinese state media reporting the death toll to be at least 28.

People were left trapped in their vehicles as falling snow engulfed the exit of a tunnel in the south-eastern city of Nyingchi on Tuesday evening.

Local rescuers said the avalanche was "triggered by powerful winds".

It is not known how many people are still missing.

However, 53 survivors were found, five of whom were seriously injured, according to Global Times, citing a local government official.

State-run Xinhua news agency reported that local authorities sent 1,348 rescue workers and 236 pieces of equipment to help excavate a passage of 7.5km (4.66 miles)

The avalanche covered a highway that connects the town of Pai in Mainling county and Medog county in Tibet, a remote and mainly Buddhist region in western China.

The mountain has an altitude of nearly 4,500 metres (14,764 ft), as well as steep slopes and part of the road that runs along it is rugged.

Rising temperatures also played a part in the disaster, experts from the local emergency rescue headquarters told Xinhua.

The Himalayas are often hit by avalanches, as it is home to the world's highest mountains.

At least 26 people died back in October after a mountaineering expedition was caught in an avalanche on Mount Draupadi ka Danda-II, in India's northern state of Uttarakhand.

Credit: BBC News

BEIJING DIARY: A taste of Tibet with Chinese characteristics

People attending the Beijing Winter Olympics can't visit Tibet because they're in China's “closed loop" system for foreign visitors

By KELVIN CHAN Associated Press

February 11, 2022, 9:15 PM ET

The main entrance of the Tibet Hotel is seen behind a police vehicle parked outside the hotel at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Friday, Feb. 11, 2022, in Beijing. People attending the Beijing Winter Olympics can't visit Tibet because they're in China's "closed loop" system for foreign visitors. But some visitors, including part of the Associated Press' Olympics team, are getting a taste of the region because they've been assigned to the Tibet Hotel. The hotel has been built and outfitted to evoke the remote region on China's western edge. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

The Associated Press

BEIJING -- I can't visit Tibet while I'm in China working at the Beijing Winter Olympics. But China can show me its own version of the remote region.

China's “closed loop” system for the Games means it's almost impossible for any of the thousands of athletes, sports officials, journalists, and media workers who have arrived from overseas to get out and see the country.

Games attendees are staying at dozens of hotels, all fenced off from the rest of Beijing and accessible only by bus or taxi to the press center, competition venues, or the airport.

By chance, part of The Associated Press' Olympics team has been assigned to the Beijing Tibet Hotel, which has been built and outfitted to evoke the distant region on China's western edge.

I've traveled widely in China but have never been to Tibet, a long-isolated place that's always been hard for foreigners, especially journalists, to reach, well before pandemic travel restrictions. Foreign correspondents can only visit on government-organized tours. So I was curious to see what the hotel would be like.

For foreigners, Tibet brings to mind snowcapped peaks, crimson-robed monks and prayer flags snapping in the Himalayan wind.

China's Communist Party took full control of the vast Himalayan region in 1951, when troops overran Tibet's feeble defenses. An uprising eight years later led to increasingly harsh Chinese rule over the region. Rights groups accuse China of political repression and tightening control over traditional Buddhist culture in the region, home to Tibetans and other ethnic minorities.

China denies the allegations. The government says its modernization efforts have brought Tibet out of isolation, but critics say Tibetans have less say on building their future than Han Chinese migrants.

At the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Tibet was a flashpoint. Protesters disrupted the flame lighting ceremony and parts of the relay route.

I wondered what connection the hotel had to Tibet. A waitress at the hotel restaurant told me it was owned by the Tibet regional government. The hotel website revealed it was linked to a Tibetan government-owned company that also sells Tibetan medicine, food, and handicrafts.

It's not unusual for Chinese regional or provincial governments to operate hotels in the capital. Other Olympic visitors are being put up at the Guizhou and Fujian hotels — provinces in the southwest and on the coast across from Taiwan.

The hotel's exterior walls gently slant inwards as they rise to the roof, an architectural feature reminiscent of the Potala Palace in the capital, Lhasa, the home of Tibet’s traditional Buddhist leaders. Elevator video screens play scenes of Tibetan landscapes on an endless loop.

Some of the Chinese writing, like the gold lettering for the coffee shop and banquet rooms, mimics the distinct angular style of Tibetan script.

Were these designs touches a tasteful appreciation of Tibetan culture? Or Chinese-style cultural appropriation? It probably depends on whom you ask.

One of the hotel's two restaurants, Shambhala — a reference from Tibetan Buddhism to a mythical kingdom hidden in the Himalayas — is decorated with prayers wheels along one wall. It's closed during the Olympics because there aren't enough diners. The other restaurant features dishes with yak meat, a staple food on the Tibetan plateau, where yaks are native. At dinner one evening, I chose the yak stew. Tasted a lot like beef.

Missing from the menu were yak butter tea or tsampa (cereal made from barley flour), also Tibetan signature delicacies.

So far, it mostly seemed like a standard and fairly innocuous showcase of local culture. But there were signs of the Chinese Communist Party's grip on history.

In the unused conference room, I came across a portrait of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, with his name and party secretary title underneath in both Chinese and Tibetan.

And down one hallway, there's an extensive exhibition of Tibetan life under Chinese rule, explaining how Xi's strategy for Tibet will help the region “enter a New Era of socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Pictures of Tibet's stunning scenery and people and displays of traditional garb are mixed with commentary on the Communist Party's role in modernization.

“The old Tibet was the purgatory for millions of serfs, who lived a miserable life," one section read. “The new Tibet is a happy paradise for the people."Conspicuously absent are photos of the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual figure that many Tibetans claim allegiance to, but who is a target of scorn by Beijing. Neither are their images of the Panchen Lama, Tibetan Buddhism's second-highest figure. He went missing 25 years ago at the age of 6 after being picked by the Dalai Lama, after which China named another boy to the position.

Instead, there are photos of Xi and historical shots of Communist Party bosses signing an agreement with Tibetan leaders in 1951. The unspoken message: It's Beijing who calls the shots.

Xi's visit to Tibet last year, the first by a Chinese leader in 30 years, reinforced that message.

But what did real Tibetans have to say? Were any actually working here? In previous Olympics, the lack of restrictions at least gave visitors more opportunities to meet and talk to local people.

I started asking around. A cleaning attendant was from the neighboring Hebei province. The restaurant manager was a Beijinger. The lobby convenience shop attendant was from Gansu, a province next to Tibet.

Eventually, I found some Tibetans working in the hotel restaurant. One said they had been sent from their school in Tibet to work at the hotel for several months as they studied hospitality.

I asked another what Lhasa was like.

“Nice," she said, giving me a thumbs up.

Then the restaurant manager appeared with a message: If I had any questions, I should ask him.

———

Kelvin Chan covered Hong Kong for 7 1/2 years and is now an AP business writer in London. Follow him at http://twitter.com/chanman.

Credit: ABC News