A tale of two presidents

By Georgie Anne Geyer

Late last week, Chinese leader Xi Jinping made his first visit to Hong Kong as president, elegantly dressed and clearly in control.

For hints of the future, kindly note that he visited the garrison of the People's Liberation Army, while Hong Kong newspapers duly reported that China's first aircraft carrier will visit the beauteous city later this month.

Meanwhile in Washington, American President Donald Trump was, once again, the center of another contretemps in the glittering world of Twitter. The new South Korean president was visiting, but who noticed?

Surely, on just about every thoughtful American's mind was the real news that the moody, brooding, quick-to-anger Trump had insulted MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, calling him "Psycho Joe" and her "low I.Q. Crazy Mika." And, please hold this in your mind for just a moment: The tweet referred back to last New Year's Eve.

Back in Hong Kong, it was the 20th anniversary of the July 1, 1997, handover of the British colony to Communist China.

In a July column that year, I wrote: "So the primary outstanding question is this: Can Hong Kong's unique economic power, backed by the free market principles behind it, influence China, or will the corruption of Beijing inevitably overwhelm Hong Kong?"

I remember that many Hong Kong residents, who had enjoyed a unique loyalty to their special city/state/colony (and semiautonomous zone within China), were hopeful, even ebullient. They believed the mainland Chinese did mean it when they hammered out reformer Deng Xiaoping's "One Country, Two Systems" idea that would make it possible for them to live together under different rules.

One man who did not believe it was Martin Lee, the respected Hong Kong democrat. The original policy, he outlined for me, was supposed to be one of Beijing being "hands off." But even then, it had already changed to a political "hands on."

"China's policy on Hong Kong can now be expressed in one word: control," he told me.

But back in Washington this week, few were thinking of the fact that President Trump had himself, if sometimes indirectly, referred to the danger of Chinese perfidy, whether with Hong Kong or with American companies.

No, everyone's thoughts were on poor Joe and Mika. Even when Trump is right on an issue, so many are appalled by his most recent vulgarity - by the president of the United States! - that any credit due him is simply lost.

I first went to China in 1983, during the period just before the end of the drear, cruel, unjust communist era. By the next year when I returned, things were already changing. The political leadership was still communist, but the economy was liberalizing. Above all, American companies were jousting one another like greedy medieval knights for the right, as they told us correspondents, to get into the enormous Chinese market and to "be there already" when it opened.

To accomplish this, they gave the Chinese government just about anything it asked for - technology, know-how, scholarships to the U.S. for their children - apparently never suspecting they were being set up.

In Beijing, when I asked at the embassy who was the lobbyist in Washington for the Chinese government, I was told the American Chamber of Commerce. This turned out to be true. And when I asked the president of DuPont who was making money in China, he answered, "No one." But, of course, they hoped things would change - and they surely did.

Today, there are virtually no American brands in China. Beijing's inclusion in the World Trade Organization, which naive American CEOs and diplomats believed would open their markets, had only the opposite effect. You have to hand it to the Chinese: They used globalization as a mechanism to learn the secrets of the world, and then to do it all themselves.

Poor, foolish Donald J. Trump. From his speeches, he seemed to have seen or sensed how American companies were used by China and what tragedies this wrought at home. He could have gone down as a hero to the workers left behind in the Rust Belt by the same American companies flocking to Beijing. But instead, he is appearing before the world as a fool who cannot control his most infantile passions, while Xi Jinping walks confidently down the world's catwalk, planning his great new Silk Road.

And remember, the president's unfortunate Joe/Mika tweet was about a supposed event last New Year's Eve. Six months ago! There are many frightening aspects to this whole story, but the scariest of all is that he has stewed about this for all these months before letting it explode in a manner totally destructive to him, to his presidency and to his country.

If he will do this to two television personalities at home, what on earth will he do to the rest of the world?

Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

© 2017, Universal