Once upon a time, a U.S. president asked his aides for one thing before his trip to Beijing: a chance to be seen as a regular guy.
It was 2005, a relatively warm chapter in U.S.-China relations, and George W. Bush was a passionate mountain biker. So Dennis Wilder, then the senior director for East Asian affairs at the National Security Council, had an idea. “Why not arrange a ride with China’s national mountain biking team?” Wilder said.
Beijing at the time was planning to host the 2008 Olympics, and Wilder asked the CIA whether the Olympic mountain-biking track had been built yet. The agency came back with good news and bad news: it had a satellite photo of the site, but construction hadn’t started.
Wilder called Sandy Randt, the U.S. ambassador in Beijing. No problem, he was told. Two days later, 10,000 People’s Liberation Army soldiers were deployed to build the track. It was finished in two weeks—trees planted and everything.
“Whatever you want,” Wilder recalled in a recent interview. “You want a mountain bike track, we’ll get you one.”
That was then.
As President Trump prepares to travel to Beijing for a May 14-15 summit with Xi Jinping—the first state visit by a U.S. president to China in nearly a decade—the behind-the-scenes machinery of summit planning looks very different from the days when the two countries could still, occasionally, surprise each other with generosity. The logistics remain as punishing as ever. The goodwill is harder to find.
Wilder later oversaw Bush’s 2008 Beijing Olympics visit—what he calls “sheer hell,” a logistical beast involving not just Bush but his father, former President George H.W. Bush, and Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state who helped open the U.S.-China relations in 1972. Wilder describes summit planning as an exercise in controlled obsession.
Every movement, every car assignment, every handshake position is mapped out in advance. Walk-throughs are conducted at every venue. Markers are placed on floors to show exactly where the leaders—and their spouses—will stand. Nothing, in theory, is left to chance.
The 2008 Olympics visit carried its own historic footnote, largely forgotten now. It marked the first-ever meeting between an American president and a man named Xi Jinping—then not China’s leader, but the head of Beijing’s Olympic Committee. Bush came away underwhelmed, Wilder recalled.
“He was absolutely boring,” Wilder said of Xi. “He couldn’t have been more boring.” The explanation, with hindsight, is obvious: Xi was biding his time. He wasn’t going to say anything that could get him in trouble.
Bush turned to Wilder after the meeting with Xi. “That was a wasted meeting,” he said. “Why’d you put that on the schedule, Dennis?”
Eighteen years later, Xi is the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao — and the man Trump is flying to Beijing to see.
There is one variable that no amount of advance planning can fully neutralize: jet lag.
“Your president can be off his game,” Wilder said matter-of-factly. The doctors travel with the delegation and do what they can. On Air Force One, Ambien is distributed liberally to staffers hoping to arrive in any condition to function.
For the president himself, there is rarely the luxury of a recovery day. You land, and the schedule begins.
Not all the drama involves the principals. At one point during a Bush-era visit, Chinese security officials got so aggressive with American reporters at a press conference that Wilder intervened physically.
“I literally knocked over three security guards,” Wilder said. “They attacked one of my reporters. To hell with you.” He took them down, he said, with a football tackle.
The Chinese, Wilder observed, have never been easy on foreign journalists. They tend to prefer reporters who don’t speak Chinese and can’t blend in. Fluency, in Beijing’s calculus, is a demerit.
That dynamic has only worsened. The coming summit is taking place against a backdrop of tightening media access. American journalists have faced increasing difficulties obtaining Chinese visas, while Beijing has protested U.S. restrictions on journalists working for Chinese state-media outlets.
Wilder describes the Bush years in U.S.-China relations with barely concealed nostalgia. He calls it “the golden age.”
It was a time when an American president could ask for something as improbable as a mountain bike track in Beijing, and 10,000 soldiers would materialize to build it in a fortnight; when the CIA had satellite photos of the construction site; when Chinese officials would personally ensure that a group of young cyclists were on hand to ride alongside the leader of the free world, rather than a column of PLA soldiers.
“He was just delighted,” Wilder said of Bush on that day, pedaling through a brand-new track in Beijing that had not existed weeks earlier. “That’s the kind of thing you look for—to really humanize.”
As Trump heads to Beijing for his summit with Xi, both sides will be looking for that humanizing moment too. Whether the conditions exist to find one is another question entirely.
What kind of moment, if any, would surprise you in Beijing? Write to me at lingling.wei@wsj.com. Include your full name and location, and I might publish your response in a coming issue (if you’re reading this in your inbox, you can just hit reply).
This is an edition of the WSJ China newsletter, a weekly dispatch of exclusive insights on the contest between the U.S. and China, brought to you by the WSJ’s top China correspondent. If you’re not subscribed, sign up here.
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Reader Responses
This is the final round of your reflections on memory, identity, and what anchors us when the ground shifts. As before, we’ve tried to let each voice breathe. Thank you, once more, for trusting us with these:
“This year’s Qingming Festival was perhaps the most special and heartbreaking for me—around two weeks ago, I lost my father forever. He was 71. My dad was born in Shanghai in 1955 before the Cultural Revolution. He spent his whole 20s in Nanjing, as part of the lingering policy that ordered young people from big cities to the lower-tier ones. He managed to make his way back to Shanghai, met with my mom, got married, and raised a family of his own. He used his modest income to support my study, including a full-time M.B.A. in the U.S., which has a considerable price tag.
My dad dedicated his life to the values of dignity, kindness and parsimony. He didn’t want to lose face—he always wanted to have a ‘good face,’ including a respectable job, his son attending the top university both in the U.S. and China, and not letting others know about his physical conditions. He always put other people’s interests before his own. He cared for everyone but himself.
As the world changes rapidly, it is the values from our family that sticks. You can be anywhere in the world, but you can’t change your blood line, your cultural background, your ‘roots.’ I hope I will hold them strong and one day past them down to the next generation.” —Zhongyuan Zhou, China
“Your column brought back many happy memories of living in Shenzhen, where my wife and I spent 10 years teaching English. We were there at a time of tremendous changes: political, economic, architectural, culinary, educational. When we first arrived in 2007, there were still vestiges of the old system in which foreigners had to carry passports at all times. There were no Starbucks, one McDonald’s (the very first in China, I believe), one Walmart, a very small subway system, many rundown, older buildings.
By the time we left in 2017, all had been transformed: shiny new skyscrapers, new roads, a new airport, miles and miles of the new lines of the Metro, McDonald’s, Walmarts and Starbucks everywhere. The crackdown on corruption hugely affected our public schools, as did the construction boom.
We left behind a transformed China, politically, economically. We also left a part of our hearts, as we will always miss our dear Chinese friends and the beauty of China.” —Bruce Barrett, Missouri
“My wife is Asian, most of her family remains in Vietnam. She left in 1970, the bride of a U.S. Marine. She lost contact with her family in 1979. They found us in late 2002, and we visited them for the first time in the summer of 2003. It was less than a decade following the end of the famine; the marks of that experience on her mom and siblings was still evident.
They ate at every opportunity copious amounts of food, yet remained rail thin. Because her dad worked for the South Vietnamese government, his wife and children were prohibited from being employed, except in the black market. We had dinner with most of them every night, and while they were still poor, they looked to the future with hope. We have remained in touch, with Kim visiting her kin several times over the past 20-plus years.” —Jim Thornton, Texas
(Responses have been condensed and edited.)
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