Chinese President Xi Jinping to dine with Iowa 'old friends' during visit to the U.S.
Kevin Baskins, Des Moines Register
6 min read
California may be the setting, but when “old friends” meet around the dinner table on Wednesday night, the relationship between China and Iowa will take center stage.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is arriving in San Francisco for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, where he will meet with President Joe Biden and other leaders from the region. But for dinner, he'll be gathering by his invitation with a group he has called his “old friends”: the Iowans who hosted him when, as a county-level official and chemical engineer from Hebei Province, he visited the state nearly 40 years ago to get a view of American agriculture.
The meeting will come at a time of growing tension between the two largest economies in the world. Republican presidential candidates have routinely denounced the Chinese Communist Party that Xi leads as the No. 1 threat to the United States. Biden also has had harsh words for Xi, calling him a "dictator" in June.
Former U.S. Ambassador to China and ex-Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad will be part of an "old friends" delegation from Iowa dining Wednesday with President Xi Jinping of China.
One of the old friends who will be at the dinner is former U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad, who was in his first term as Iowa governor when he met Xi during that 1985 visit. He said enmity toward China is rising well beyond U.S. borders.
“Not only in America, but it’s all over the world really. And it started really with COVID, and the fact that the Chinese were not honest or forthright with the fact that COVID started in China, and consequently I’ve read different things that the opinion of China in other parts of the world, whether it’s the United States, Japan, Australia, Europe, it’s not nearly what it used to be,” Branstad said.
“We all thought Xi Jinping would be a reformer like his father, with further opening up, and it’s gone the other way, with him becoming more authoritarian, and he’s consolidated power and given more authority to the Communist Party,” he said.
Still, he said, the relationship between Iowa and China endures, deeply rooted in a common interest: agriculture.
“Agriculture is very important, and China … can't really feed all of themselves, especially protein, and consequently, one of the things that's grown from our relationship is a dramatic increase in trade, especially in agricultural goods like pork and soybeans and now also beef and chicken,” Branstad said.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that in fiscal year 2022, agricultural exports to China topped $35 billion, surpassing the previous year’s record.
So despite the strained relations with China, Iowans attending the meeting with Xi are going into the event with optimism.
Retired World Food Prize head wants to see cooperative project
Another of the dinner guests, Ken Quinn, former U.S. ambassador to Cambodia and former president of the Des Moines-based World Food Prize, a post Branstad now holds, was already in San Francisco on Tuesday. Quinn said the U.S. and China have the opportunity to work together to meet what he calls the world’s biggest challenge: providing enough food for billions of people not only in China, but in many of the developing nations the two nations compete to influence.
“Every time I’ve spoken in China and in the U.S., I stress there’s an opportunity for China and the U.S. to work together to uplift Africa and Earth," he said. "I've urged the two presidents to announce that they were going to have just such a partnership aimed at upgrading rural roads, farm-to-market roads (in Africa) because that's the key.”
Quinn said transportation infrastructure was essential to the development of Iowa and the U.S. in general, and in easing China’s poverty, too.
“It was building all those farm-to-market roads. So no technology to be stolen there, no national security, but it's something China and the U.S. can do and should do together," he said. "And I believe if collaboration like that were to be announced at the meeting tomorrow it would be a big headline and would move the two countries' relationship in a more positive direction.”
Quinn and Branstad said both the U.S. and China have an existential stake in reducing worldwide food insecurity.
“Hungry people don't sit still. They move across borders. They move to go and find food, go where food is," Quinn said. "And so it's in our great interest and in China's great interest that the world remain peaceful and stable. And I believe the way to do that is through agriculture.”
Another Xi Jinping friend cites Chinese president's affection for Iowa
Also sitting at the dinner table will be Luca Berrone, the Des Moines businessman who spearheaded the unlikely relationship between eastern Iowa and the man who now holds sway in Beijing.
It was Berrone, an Italian immigrant, who set the wheels in motion back in 1983 by forging a partnership through the Iowa Sister States program with Hebei Province, which like Iowa counts corn and soybeans among its major crops.
In his Muscatine-centered stay in 1985, Xi's experiences included riding a boat on the Mississippi and climbing aboard some of Iowa’s massive farm machinery.
But it was what Berrone called a “glitch” in that first visit that he said sealed Xi's bonds with the state, and ended up with him revisiting Iowa in 2012 just before becoming China’s president.
During the first visit, he recalled, "The only hotel available in Muscatine was all booked up. So I reached out to Sarah Lande, who was on the (Iowa Sister States) committee, and I asked if it was possible to organize home stays for the Chinese delegation, and she was able to contact a few families that were interested."
“And it turned out those home stays were a turning point in building those long-term friendships,” Berrone said.
He, Branstad and Quinn all pointed out that Xi has said that when he thinks of America, he remembers those friendships he made when he was an unknown party official.
Quinn recalls a dinner held at the Iowa Capitol during Xi’s 2012 visit to Iowa.
“And there, in the middle of his toast, President Xi Jinping diverted from the script and started speaking about his memories of Muscatine (from 1985) and he quoted Mark Twain, and he spoke about his memories of seeing the sun over the Mississippi, and it was so poignant. It was so moving," Quinn said. "I remember sitting there saying, ‘Wow, I've never ever heard a foreign leader speak about our country, about my country, that way,’ and that that visit in Muscatine really had a significant impact.”
Kevin Baskins covers jobs and the economy for the Des Moines Register. Reach him at kbaskins@registermedia.com.
