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January 19, 2011
Business Leaders Make Cut at State
Dinner With HuBy SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter made the cut. So did Bill
Clinton and his wife, th
secretary of state. The heads of Microsoft, Boeing, Goldman
Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Walt
Disney were on the list. So were the singer Barbra Streisand,
the ice skater Michelle Kwan, the
cellistYo-Yo Ma, the architect Maya Lin and the fashion designer
Vera Wang.
But Fred P. Hochberg, the chairman of the Export-Import Bank,
did not make the list for
President Obamas state dinner for President Hu Jintao ofChina,
even though trade was a majo
theme of the day. Neither did Daphne Kwok, even though Mr. Obama
named her last July to hea
the White House Advisory Commission on Asian-Americans and
Pacific Islanders.
Im extremely happy for some of my friends that got to go
tonight, said Ms. Kwok, a longtime
advocate for Asian-Americans who lives in San Francisco. You
cant compete against President
Carter and President Clinton. My goodness.
The 225 guests at Wednesday nights White House affair were, in a
certain sense, survivors. All
made it through an intense winnowing-down process by a White
House confronted by some of
toughest jockeying for invitations in recent memory.
The White House was especially private about the planning, for
fear of saying or doing somethin
that might offend the Chinese. The theme for the evening was
quintessentially American, with
menu that featured farm-fresh vegetables, poached Maine lobster,
dry-aged rib-eye with
buttermilk crisp onions, topped off by old-fashioned apple pie
with ice cream. The entertainmenin the White House East Room, was
the most quintessential of American music a parade of ja
greats, including Herbie Hancock.
The guest list was heavy on Chinese-Americans and corporate
executives no surprise, given
that President Obama used Mr. Hus visit to press China to open
its markets to goods made by
American companies. One official familiar with the planning of
the dinner said there was
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definitely a clamoring among business leaders to get in.
Some attendees were blithe about it.
I was born Chinese, I think, said Representative David Wu,
Democrat of Oregon, explaining wh
he got his invitation.
He said it came in over the transom, but he was not entirely
surprised, given that he is the first
Chinese-American ever elected to the House, and has been an
advocate for human rights in
China. Mr. Wu traveled to Oslo recently to attend the ceremony
at which Liu Xiaobo, the
imprisoned Chinese dissident, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
in absentia.
Mr. Obama has been publicly pressing Mr. Hu over Chinas human
rights record, and the White
House seemed to be using the guest list to reinforce that
message. Kenneth Roth, executive
director ofHuman Rights Watch, was among the attendees. I take
the reason I was invited as a
statement to President Hu, Mr. Roth said.
The list included a fair number of Obama administration
insiders, including two Chinese-
American White House aides, Christopher P. Lu and Christina M.
Tchen, as well as the highest-
ranking Chinese-Americans in the administration, Commerce
SecretaryGary Locke and Energy
SecretarySteven Chu. And it included a number of people close to
the U.S.-China Business
Council, which represents major American corporations doing
business in China, and the
Committee of 100, a nonpartisan group of prominent
Chinese-Americans.
Journalists, too, made the dinner cut, among them Nicholas D.
Kristof of The New York Times,
who with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, won the Pulitzer Prize for
their coverage of the Tiananmen
Square uprising in 1989. Wendi Deng Murdoch, the wife of the
media magnate Rupert Murdoch
was there without her husband. She said he was traveling.
The dinner came just hours after a State Department lunch, where
Mr. Hu was treated to roasted
butternut squash soup and fillet of Alaskan cod; his hosts were
Vice President Joseph R. Biden J
and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Among the roughly
175 guests were some of the
same big names who attended the dinner later: Ms. Kwan; Ms.
Wang; at least three former
secretaries of state, Henry A. Kissinger, Madeleine K. Albright
and George P. Shultz; and Ms.
Streisand.
Later, as she walked into the White House for the dinner, Ms.
Streisand was asked what
accounted for her invitation. Her reply was deadpan: I worked in
a Chinese restaurant.
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