Will Clinton's journey to China save the presidency?

By Edward Neilan

'Photo opportunity' aspects tend to obscure some genuine points of significance but relations may advance.

STANFORD, California (JP): The President Bill Clinton China odyssey now taking place is awash in superlatives.

Although the trip has significance, it will be remembered primarily as diplomacy's greatest-ever photo-opportunity.

It is the largest, most expensive overseas trip ever undertaken by a president of the United States.

The 1200-plus members of the entourage, including government officials, security personnel, advisers, spin doctors, cooks, hairdressers -- not to mention 365 American reporters and photographers -- make it history's grandest foray by a chief-of- state of one country visiting another.

The previously strongest official delegation to visit Beijing (it has also been known as Peiping and Peking) was when Genghis Khan and his cast of thousands rode in from Mongolia on horseback several hundred years ago.

For sheer spectacle, as captured by the world's television networks, the Clinton trip will outshine P.T. Barnum's The Greatest Show on Earth and the most lavish movie productions of Cecil B. DeMille. It may rival the motion picture Titanic for one-week viewership though not at the box office in terms of profits.

After all, this is about the leader of the world's richest and most powerful nation visiting the headquarters of the Middle Kingdom -- the Chinese like to call it "the Center of the World" -- which also happens to be the world's most populous nation with 1.2 billion Chinese and a claim on being a likely bona fide world power someday.

One scarcely-mentioned facet of the visit is security. A bullet-proof lectern and bullet-proof limousine are being flown in, along with an extra contingent of secret service personnel from Washington. And those fit-looking young men with white- sidewall haircuts and wearing dark suits which you will see on television during the visit are the some 200 U.S. Marines on TDY (temporary duty) from posts all over Asia to guard Clinton during the visit.

It will be the biggest, most concentrated, show of American military force on Chinese soil since the Boxer Rebellion.

The most heavily-guarded U.S. official itinerary before Clinton wasn't President Richard Nixon's breakthrough 1973 visit to China. It was the 1987 visit by Secretary of State George Shultz -- I joined the press corps of less than 100 from my Tokyo base -- which took a look at Dalian, Confucius' birthplace of Chufu and Tsinan as well as more familiar places. Shultz, with a background as a Marine officer, personally spelled out the security arrangements.

That was the time of the first big disillusionment over the new China market. Now many American firms are at that point again. Renewed optimism and hype have turned to hard reality: it is difficult for any foreigners other than lawyers and business consultants to make a profit in the China market.

The Clinton China trip, aside from the arguable goal of advancing U.S.-China relations, is about saving the presidency.

Make that plural -- saving the presidencies.

Both Clinton and Chinese Present Jiang Zemin could find that the ripples of hoopla from this meeting will be decisive to their future political careers and places in history.

The trip may provide sufficient distraction, sufficient atmospherics including renewal of respect for the office of the presidency, for Clinton to elude massive negative fallout from the Monica Lewinsky affair with all of its wide-ranging innuendoes.

The timing alone could keep Clinton at a high point in the polls as Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr is likely to deliver his report while China fever is still high. Clinton also must answer to charges on questionable Democratic Party fund-raising and the issue of providing help with Chinese missiles and other high tech items that might impinge on U.S. national security.

Implications from the trip for President Jiang may be even more critical than for Clinton. Coming off his thumbs-up U.S. trip last year and ahead of his important September visit to Japan, Jiang's adroitness in hosting Clinton will help solidify his quest for recognition as China's next Great Helmsman after the late Deng Xiaoping.

The writer is a Tokyo-based analyst of Northeast Asian affairs and a Media Fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University.