-Caveat Lector-
>From http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4421273,00.html
}}}>Begin
Rambling Clinton strolls off with $250,000
John Gittings in Shanghai
Saturday May 25, 2002
The Guardian
A rambling and expensive speech by the former US president Bill Clinton in southern
China has gone down spectacularly badly, according to the Chinese press.
Many in the audience in Shenzhen, which comprised various dignitaries, found it so
hard to follow that they took off the headsets providing simultaneous translation.
Mr Clinton was supposed to speak on Thursday about the "World Trade
Organisation and the Chinese real estate economy," because a local property
company was paying him $250,000 (�170,000) for the speech.
Instead he uttered platitudes about the need for "personal understanding" between
US and Chinese leaders and reminisced about his first visit to China in 1998, when
he held a successful summit with the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin.
Members of the audience, who had waited for hours because his plane was delayed,
then asked him about international affairs and politics. "Although he had nothing
worth saying, he kept going on," the Yangcheng Evening News commented
yesterday.
Asked to predict the outcome of the Middle East crisis, Mr Clinton smiled
ingenuously and confessed: "I don't know, I really don't know." The entire audience,
which included the mayor of Guangzhou and 300 invited foreign and Chinese guests,
burst out laughing.
Mr Clinton's chutzpah in collecting his fee without doing any homework has been
widely noted. The Chinese Communist party's official People's Daily website reported
it under the headline "Clinton reaps $250,000 in 30- minute speech in Shenzhen."
There was no apparent note of censure in the Chinese press comment yesterday;
instead, the response seemed to be a hint of admiration that he could get away with.
It was noted that Mr Clinton had earned only $100,000 for a speech to the Fortune
Forum in Hong Kong last year.
He arrived in China from Japan, where he received an honorary doctorate at Nihon
University and lectured on globalisation. Observers in Tokyo suggest that the
Japanese press would have been far too polite to say that his speech there was less
than riveting.
Guardian Unlimited � Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
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