For a remarkable bit of puffery, check out the New York Times's August 30 profile of former Tennessee senator Jim Sasser, who has just wrapped up a three-and-a-half-year stint as Bill Clinton's ambassador to China. From the first overheated line -- "He faced down the rampaging mobs in the streets of Beijing last spring" -- the Times seemingly suspends all critical assessment of what the (triteness alert!) "courtly" ex-senator has to say.
Sasser, for example, is "convinced that senior leaders of the Chinese Government did not encourage the violence and that they were unaware that police had lost control of the mob outside the embassy."
Why is he so convinced? Because, as Sasser tells the credulous Times reporter, "What they saw on television -- Chinese television -- were peaceful student demonstrations. They weren't seeing the rocks being thrown, the Molotov cocktails." Of course, what appeared on Chinese TV was what the senior leadership wanted to have appear on TV. Sasser seems to believe that the Chinese leadership depends on its own propaganda organs for news of what is going on in its own capital. What's more, Sasser seems to think it's meaningful that when a "junior Foreign Ministry official" visited the embassy, "his jaw just sort of fell. . . . The Foreign Ministry just didn't have any idea, I don't think, of what was going on."
This explains a lot. Sasser evidently thinks the Chinese government is organized such that a junior foreign ministry official has access to the top leadership's thoughts and actions. Only slightly less ludicrously, he apparently thinks that the foreign ministry itself would be cut in on something like the siege of the U.S. embassy. If the top leadership wants to use the American embassy as a target for the venting of popular anger, it is unlikely to consult the Foreign Ministry about it.
In striking contrast to his Chinese hosts, who professed deep dissatisfaction with what they deemed the insufficient American apologies for the accidental NATO bombing of China's Belgrade embassy, Sasser seems to think it meaningful that, while not apologizing, Chinese President Jiang Zemin "said to me that 'things happened that we did not intend to happen.'" At least Sasser doesn't claim that Jiang was unaware of Clinton's apology, even though it never appeared on Chinese TV.