Eyeing the White House After Service in China

Blindsided, Pentagon officials considered whether the best response would be to pack up and leave before the mission had even begun. The American ambassador, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., advised forcefully against it. Too much was at stake, he said. Better to make clear Mr. Gates’s displeasure, then move on to more serious business.

Which is what Mr. Gates did, raising the issue with President Hu Jintao and relaying Mr. Hu’s embarrassed response to reporters shortly afterward.

“Jon came in and gave sensible advice,” said a person who was privy to the discussion and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the debate had been both private and official. “It was classic and proper handling of a difficult situation with the Chinese.”

It was also classic Huntsman. The ambassador, who was to leave his post on Saturday, has proved deft with the carrot and stick, mixing measured criticism of China’s government with a relentless effort to cement its fractious relations with the United States. It has not always worked: in recent months, as China’s growing crackdown on domestic dissidents drew Mr. Huntsman’s pointed objections, the efforts of the ambassador and other American diplomats have been angrily rejected by Beijing.

When President Obama selected Mr. Huntsman, then the popular Republican governor of Utah, as ambassador in 2009, pundits speculated that the president was working to edge him out of the race for the 2012 Republican nomination. Mr. Huntsman has implied otherwise in speeches, expressing respect for Mr. Obama’s skills and saying that they share a common cause in improving relations.

Now that Mr. Huntsman is publicly pondering a run for the nomination anyway — an unstated but clear reason behind his departure — the question may not be whether his China stint hurt his chances, but whether it improved them. Clearly, he did not achieve the goals he set. In a valedictory speech last month in Shanghai, he put his frustrations with China’s prickly and suspicious diplomacy on full display.

“Turning the relationship on and off in reaction to unwelcome events is inconsistent with the objective of a positive, cooperative and comprehensive relationship that our leaders have set out to achieve,” Mr. Huntsman said. “Canceling meetings as a sign of displeasure will not encourage greater respect for each other’s views.”

“We cannot move forward if, when differences emerge, only one of us is fully committed and fully engaged,” he said.

Getting China fully engaged — and persuading it to temper the suspicion and resentment that has marked even warm periods in its relationship with the United States — is the Obama administration’s strategic goal and, by all accounts, Mr. Huntsman’s passion. If that goal is, by many assessments, only slightly less distant than it was two years ago by, his pursuit of it wins wide praise.

“The course of a major relationship such as that between the United States and China is not going to be guided solely by the skill or lack thereof of an ambassador, but what an ambassador can do is make a meaningful difference,” J. Stapleton Roy, a China-born diplomat who served President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush and was President Bill Clinton’s first ambassador to China, said. “If Washington has confidence in the ambassador and the ambassador has access, then a lot of business will get done.” Mr. Huntsman, he said, “has what it takes. He’s done a superb job.”

Current and former diplomats and White House officials said he skillfully managed preparations for the two signal occasions of his tenure, the state visits of both nations’ leaders to the other’s capital. Workers at the United States Embassy in Beijing give him high marks for his management of the United States’ second-largest diplomatic outpost.

Officially, the Chinese government bade him a fond farewell. Vice President Xi Jinping, the heir apparent to President Hu, called him “an old friend of China” in a meeting last month, adding, “We will never forget what you have done.”

Polished by years in American politics and fluent in Mandarin, Mr. Huntsman was nothing if not charming in his courtship of the Chinese. He regularly reminded Chinese audiences of his adopted Chinese daughter and his years in Asia as a youth. He flummoxed Chinese security guards — but perhaps left a distinctively American impression on Chinese diplomats — by forgoing the requisite limousine and suit and instead bicycling in casual clothes to several meetings at the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

He nevertheless spent much of his two years in the diplomatic doghouse. Mr. Huntsman did win the rare permission to visit Tibet, but he was denied an official visit to the restive western region of Xinjiang. (He went anyway, as a private citizen.) The cold shoulder included efforts to limit his official dealings to lower-level Chinese diplomats, as is standard for ambassadors who are out of favor. Most of those moves were a consequence of the deep chill that settled over relations in 2010, when the Chinese crimped Google’s Chinese search-engine business and the White House entertained the Dalai Lama and approved the sale of weapons to Taiwan. That was dispelled only after the successful visit to Washington by Mr. Hu last winter.

Perhaps Mr. Huntsman’s greatest misstep, which he has insisted was just a coincidence, was to wander into the tense scene of a pro-democracy protest in February while on a stroll through central Beijing with his family. The protest, the first of several Internet-based calls for a “Jasmine Revolution,” drew a horde of security agents who regarded Mr. Huntsman as a potential provocateur.

Mr. Huntsman later publicly condemned the beating and detention of foreign journalists at the scene. The Chinese, who appear to believe he deliberately attended the event, placed him back in the doghouse. But last week, at a farewell reception at the United States Embassy, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi shared a toast with Mr. Huntsman and his wife. He appears to leave China in good standing — much as a future president, Mr. Bush, did when he left the chief diplomatic post in 1975.