NEW HAVEN, Conn. — In the stately stone hall, Yale University flutist Wang Mingzhu, solemn in a glimmering black dress, played her instrument quietly, deliberately, pitch-perfect.
A half-block away, hundreds of agitated demonstrators in T-shirts and headbands banged snare drums and chanted for the demise of the Chinese Communist Party.
The scene, moments before China's president spoke at one of America's most venerable campuses, was a perfect metaphor for the two narratives that define modern China — control vs. chaos, the mild poker face in the cordoned-off spotlight as roiling masses gather outside, volatile and unpredictable.
In China, of course, the masses can't protest against the state. But this was the United States, belly of the beast that Hu Jintao was busy sweet-talking.
"Understanding leads to trust"
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On his first official visit as his nation's leader, Hu did his utmost last week to exploit his fleeting bully pulpit and explain China — its motivations, its goals, its history — to America, China's biggest export market and biggest potential rival.
"More and more Americans are following with interest China's progress and development. Understanding leads to trust," Hu said Friday. "I hope this will help you gain a better understanding of China."
Anybody who pays attention to how stories are told, particularly in this age of global media, knows history favors the storyteller who can captivate his audience. In the words and images Hu chose during his visit, he made clear he knew he was characterizing China for an era.
"We've seen in the Hu visit that Americans and others, in Western Europe in particular, expect more of Chinese leaders than they did five years ago," said Deborah Davis, a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.
At every step, sometimes quite subtly, Hu told the story of a modern China that is racing "to undertake one of the greatest transformations in modern history," in the words of former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, a Hu acquaintance who now runs Yale's Center for the Study of Globalization.
Hu, the vanilla CEO
The 2006 edition of Hu Jintao seems more relaxed than the man who inherited China's top post from Jiang Zemin in 2002. His appearance — dark suit, pleasant but nondescript face, stiff but in-charge demeanor — makes him seem like the vanilla CEO of a corporation.
It's a perfect image for a country whose foreign-investment-fueled experiment in capitalism, dubbed the "socialist market economy," needs a nonthreatening front man to be not only diplomat but occasional global salesman.
In Seattle, Hu toured Boeing, which makes the most basic instruments of globalization — airplanes. He stopped in to talk with Bill Gates, icon of entrepreneurial success.
With President Bush on Thursday, Hu played the tough but open-minded leader, yielding no ground but extolling the importance of talking. At Yale, he touted the rise of an outward-looking China that wants its people to benefit from the "well-off society" promised by his generation of leaders.
Hu even seeded the English translation of his Yale speech with echoes of Lincoln's most poetic moment, saying development in China "must be for the people and by the people, and its benefit should be shared among the people."
Old China, baby U.S.
But the more traditional story remained: Hu reminded the audience at every turn, usually through ancient proverbs, that China is 5,000 years old — the implication being that the United States is a comparative toddler.
America being the chaotic democracy that it is, Hu's precisely calibrated narrative was interrupted here and there by other storytellers who have different views of today's China.
At the White House on Thursday, a reporter for a newspaper connected to the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement shrieked for several minutes before the Secret Service arrested her.
Outside the Yale speech, Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetan independence activists and other protesters — people who would be jailed in China — tried to seize their own chunks of the China story.
"Hu Jintao speaks of very positive things, but the real story of China is not being told," said one protester, Sarah Liang, a Hong Kong-based U.S. citizen who says her mother and brother are imprisoned in western China's Sichuan province for supporting Falun Gong.
Asked about human rights by one audience member at Yale, Hu insisted China would "not simply copy the political models of other countries." Then he left, headed for Saudi Arabia, where the two nations signed defense, security and trade agreements Saturday.
"I'm not sure your average American realizes that they know the propaganda China, not the genuine China." Sarah Liang
Hong Kong-based U.S. citizen, protester
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