Jon Huntsman - US Ambassador in China to run against Obama?

He's fluent in Mandarin, one of his adopted daughters was born in China and he communicates across cultural faultlines with elegance. After Barack Obama built a bridge between Caucasian Americans and African Americans, Jon Huntsman may build bridges between America and China. The US Ambassador to China handed in his resignation at the beginning of February - everybody expects the former Republican governor of Utah to take up the fight against Barack Obama in 2012.

Huntsman is described by commentators as an inspiring, charismatic and intelligent person, leaving interlocutors "slightly glassy-eyed at the memory of their encounter". In comparing Huntsman to charismatic Bill Clinton, a British businessman says that “Clinton ... was just addicted to people, like a vampire he consumed them for his own benefit. I’d put Huntsman on a higher plane than that ... it’s Huntsman’s ability to make you feel like he’s always slightly off-script, a little bit close to the edge: a joke here, a side reference there, that makes you feel he’s incapable of being evasive and not phased by anything.” The US ambassador is known for thinking outside the box and would sometimes arrive at meetings with the Chinese Foreign Ministry on his bicycle.

Of course, Huntsman's progressive and unconventional thinking makes him a difficult choice for the Republican Party. Orville Schell, Director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations says that "given the acid political environment in Washington and the emphatically anti-intellectual attitude of all too many Republicans, one is left to wonder how long a man of Huntsman’s intelligence and international experience will be able to [remain an untarnished and energized candidate]". Besides, 17 other Republican politicians are mentioned as potential candidates for the presidential bid as well.

For Europe, one of the most important questions is how far Huntsman could change the Republican Party. In a very interesting post, American author James McGregor estimates that Huntsman will have to "McCainize", to move far to the right to win the Republican bid. Where will it take him? You may remember that Republicans and Democrats alike based a considerable part of their last election campaign on China bashing. Will the Republicans now accept a mind as open as Jon Huntsman? And are they going to accept a candidate who worked for the Obama administration?

I guess before Huntsman can close any cultural gaps to China, he has to close a pretty big gap within his own party.

China and the "laowai"

"You don't know anything about China!"

I've heard that sentence quite a few times in China. One of the first words you will memorize as a foreigner in China is laowai, or foreigner. The word strikes a dividing line between you and the society in which you live. Being a foreigner, by definition you don't know China’s "unique national conditions". You don't know the exceptionalism that arises from a proud, 3000-year-old society, humiliated during the Opium Wars of the 19th century, invaded by foreign powers during the World Wars and mutilated by a ruler who is still praised as the country's national hero. And people will hold your ingnorance against you in the same way as this LSE (!) student does it from minute 44:00.

The relationship between China and the laowai is a very strange matter. On the one hand, Chinese people are extremely interested in American movies, American clothes, Christmas, McDonald's and other parts of Western consumerism. When I walked through central Shanghai, people were staring at me in awe. School girls asked me for a photo. Public schools in China employ foreigners to teach English, from high school all the way down to kindergarten. Clearly, there is an interest to know more about "the West" and about those laowai.

On the other hand, there is a deep inferiority complex toward those laowai. "Lao" itself means "old" and is normally used with a person in a more senior position. By definition, all laowai are filthy rich (which is true in a sense, considering the low value of the yuan). And filthy rich means that they're socially superior. A Chinese person will have to work a lot more than a Westerner to achieve the same social standard.

Put together the fact that Western people in China are filthy rich and that they have no idea about Chinese exceptionalism (or even the language, as the language in many foreign enterprises is English), could there be a desire to strike back at the West? Pay back the humiliation once Chinese money and power really kick off? Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson heard an invisible "We are the masters now" from his interlocutors when he recently went to China. In the EU, Portugal, Greece and Spain are now financially dependent on China. Are we facing a danger of revenge?

As laowai, we should probably spend some afternoons studying Chinese history - so that nobody can tell us "You don't know anything about China!" anymore.

Update (23/02/2011): We could start here, here or here.