U.S. ambassador nominee stirs strong emotions in China

BEIJING — The prospect of a Chinese American becoming the U.S. ambassador to China is rousing strong emotions in Beijing, revealing a thicket of conflicting feelings about race, national identity and patriotism.

Much of the reaction to President Barack Obama's nomination last week of Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, whose grandfather immigrated to the United States from southern China more than a century ago, has been positive. Locke is a former governor of his home state of Washington who has made frequent trips to China, often attracting enthusiastic crowds.

"It is little over a century that my grandfather first came to America to work as a houseboy for a family in Washington state in exchange for English lessons," Locke said Wednesday. "I'm going back to the birthplace of my grandfather and father, and I'll be doing so as a devoted and passionate advocate for America."

China's state-run Global Times quoted an analyst saying Locke would understand the Chinese way of dealing with issues, including "the subtleness that can be difficult to explain in words."

But a deep antagonism is evident in a profusion of less-than-diplomatic commentary on the Internet in China.

"A fake foreign devil who cannot even speak Chinese," wrote one anonymous contributor to an Internet forum on public affairs.

"I don't like this guy who has forgotten his ancestors" wrote someone from Dalian on a popular news site, while another from Sichuan piped in: "If he wanted to be Chinese, he wouldn't live in America."

Some Chinese call the 61-year-old commerce secretary a "traitor" and resort to ethnic slurs to disparage his being born and raised in the United States.

The hostility is no surprise to Chinese Americans who live or work in China and are alternately embraced as long-lost relatives or scorned for deserting the motherland. They often aren't recognized as foreigners and have difficulty getting into diplomatic compounds where many expatriates reside.

A running joke already among the Chinese Americans in China is that Locke better carry his passport.

"People are always asking me, 'Where are you from? Why do you look like us? Why can't you speak our mother tongue better?'\u2009" said Brooklyn-born Lillian Chou, a chef and food critic who lives in Beijing.

Locke's family spoke Taishanese, a dialect of Cantonese, which is largely incomprehensible in Beijing. His surname is an anglicized version of "Lok." Locke's wife has family ties to the late revolutionary hero, Sun Yat-sen.

Locke doesn't speak Mandarin Chinese, unlike the current ambassador, Jon Huntsman, a former Utah governor who was a Mormon missionary in Taiwan.

But Huntsman, a Republican who is reportedly exploring a run for president, angered the Chinese government by appearing Feb. 20 on a pedestrian mall in Beijing where dissidents had called for pro-democracy protests. The embassy said he happened to walk by with his family.

"To pick Gary Locke is a way for Obama to make amends," said Zhou Shijian, a senior fellow at the Center for U.S.-China relations at Tsinghua University. "He looks Chinese, but he is American and will represent the American government's interests."