Michelle Obama's Snub Of Chinese First Lady Is A Major Foreign Policy Faux Pas

This week’s summit is partly about building personal trust between the two leaders, but it’s also about enshrining the importance of the U.S.-China relationship. China wants to be taken seriously, and the United States wants China to take itself seriously. The fact that China’s first lady will fly across the Pacific but America’s couldn't bother to travel within her own country will not on its own overturn the U.S.-China relationship, of course. But it does undercut the summit’s implicit diplomatic goals in a minor but pretty direct way.

Communist Party bosses had seen the June 7-8 Sunnylands summit as a golden opportunity to deploy Peng Liyuan’s much-vaunted charms on the world stage in a bid to spin a more favourable image of China’s leaders.

But last Tuesday Mrs Obama’s office told the New York Times the first lady would remain in Washington with her daughters who are coming to the end of their academic year.
Mrs Obama’s absence is likely to limit her Chinese counterpart’s role at the two-day California meeting, which begins on Friday, and may be interpreted as a snub, analysts said.

Zhang Ming, a political scientist from China’s Renmin University, predicted Mrs Obama’s absence would “not go down very well” in Beijing.

“First lady diplomacy is also very important and the US side has failed to cooperate,” he said. “According to normal diplomatic etiquette this is very strange. It shouldn't be like this.”