Business Leaders Make Cut at State Dinner With Hu
Doug Mills/The New York Times
President Obama and the first lady, Michelle Obama, greeted President Hu Jintao of China. More Photos »
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: January 19, 2011
WASHINGTON — Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter made the cut. So didBill Clinton and his wife, the 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 cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the architect Maya Linand the fashion designer Vera Wang.
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But Fred P. Hochberg, the chairman of the Export-Import Bank, did not make the list for President Obama’s state dinner for President Hu Jintao of China, even though trade was a major theme of the day. Neither did Daphne Kwok, even though Mr. Obama named her last July to head the White House Advisory Commission on Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders.
“I’m 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 can’t compete against President Carter and President Clinton. My goodness.”
The 225 guests at Wednesday night’s 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 something that might offend the Chinese. The theme for the evening was “quintessentially American,” with a 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 entertainment, in the White House East Room, was the most quintessential of American music — a parade of jazz greats, including Herbie Hancock.
The guest list was heavy on Chinese-Americans and corporate executives — no surprise, given that President Obama used Mr. Hu’s 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 “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 why 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 whichLiu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese dissident, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in absentia.
Mr. Obama has been publicly pressing Mr. Hu over China’s human rights record, and the White House seemed to be using the guest list to reinforce that message. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human 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 Secretary Gary Locke and Energy Secretary Steven 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 PresidentJoseph R. Biden Jr. 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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