It is pretty late after I left the Ritz Carlton Club on the 43th floor of Ritz Carlton Portman hotel. US congressman Rick Larson (Democratic, Washington) and Mark Kirk (Republic, Illinois) are visiting Shanghai (news), after they arrived in Hong Kong, and visited Guangzhou, before they fly to Beijing. With the two congressmen is the inimitable Steven Orlins (as we always used the interesting word “inimitable” after the tradition of usage before Chairman Mao).
I am still not very sure about the publicity level of a political figure like a congressman in US. I suspect that everything they said would be on-the-record, and Rick confirmed that the meeting can be blogged, but I am, well, still not so sure about the field I have no idea at all. To be honest, I don’t have too much sense of how politics works. I don’t have knowledge about it in China (as most people, and exactly as what the Party wanted us to be), and don’t know about the US. So, I don’t want to talk too much about the content of the meeting.
BTW, this is my second time to see Rick Larson (the first time was a sea food dinner at Pine Market in Seattle), and it was a pity that Mark didn’t came downstairs.
there are 435 voting congressman allowed in the U.S. House, sometimes its hard to keep track of them. You might want to keep in touch with Mark Kirk, he might win the senate seat next year. we
want to know everything…….free speech!
thank god for the first amendment to the U.S. constitution.
To say “I don’t have too much sense of how politics works” actually means I don’t wanna make public the sausage-making process.
Disclose or not. There is no longer mystery. Thanks to globalization, both the US congress and ChiCong (Chinese equivalent of Viet Cong) are converging and playing the same politics:
– making a career wasting other people’s money
– rent seeking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking)
As a long time US-based reader (at least five years, now), I’d very much like to get your impressions of the meeting. As we all know, what politicians say depends on who is listening :)