WashPost: Gary Locke is “star in China” | Strange Bedfellows — Politics News - seattlepi.com
Gary Locke makes waves in China by acting like laid-back Northwest politician | OregonLive.com
Capitalist American Value : Government officials are to serve people, in the most humble way possible.
Communist Chinese Value : Government officials are to rule over people, surrounded by finest luxury and privileges. And also make millions(hundreds of millions dollars of you are a minister) as a side job.
Ordinary behavior has won friends for Locke in a country whose privileged big shots — Beijing’s polluted air is even filtered before they breathe it — rarely circulate with the masses.
He has flown economy class, reports the Post, and been seen buying his daughter ice cream in a Beijing neighborhood. He was witnessed “waiting in line with his family alongside tourists for a seat in a cable car descending from the Great Wall.”
“The reason for the fascination, many here posit, is that when Chinese look at this backpack-toting envoy with a Chinese face, they see everything their own leaders are not — leaving authorities struggling for how best to respond to his increasingly evident popularity,” the newspaper reports.
The official organs of Chinese Communism have begun to sound grumpy.
“Be Vigilant to Neo-Colonialism of America Brought by Gary Locke,” headlined a recent commentary in the Guangming Daily, a Communist Party newspaper in Beijing.
“Who knows that this just exposes the evil purpose of the U.S. to use a Chinese to play off against Chinese and to instigate a political turbulence in China?” reads the paper’s turgid prose.
And, complained the Global Times, “A U.S. ambassador becoming a political star in China cannot be interpreted as U.S. respect for China.”
Gary Locke makes waves in China by acting like laid-back Northwest politician | OregonLive.com
Since then, Locke “sightings” have included the ambassador flying in economy class, buying ice cream with his daughter in the Sanlitun neighborhood of Beijing, and waiting in line with his family alongside tourists for a seat on a cable car descending from the Great Wall.
This is not the kind of behavior that the Chinese are accustomed to seeing among their own leaders, who may officially be Communists but have a finely honed sense of status.
The Post notes that Zhao Jinjun, president of the China University of Foreign Affairs and a former Chinese ambassador to France, thought flying coach was simply gauche.
"Our country has a different opinion," Zhao is quoted as saying. "We believe more that the ambassador represents the country, so I must fly the first class if I go out as an ambassador."
Capitalist American Value : Government officials are to serve people, in the most humble way possible.
Communist Chinese Value : Government officials are to rule over people, surrounded by finest luxury and privileges. And also make millions(hundreds of millions dollars of you are a minister) as a side job.