Americans’ Long Noses and Marrying Jack Lew: Deciphering the Jokes of China’s Vice Premier

On Tuesday, I compared the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, an annual meeting between high-ranking U.S. and Chinese officials, to cardigan sweaters and actuarial tables — to make the point that typically nothing interesting gets said publicly at these summits. This year, however, as my colleague Daniel Drezner points out, China agreed to significant trade concessions.

But perhaps more surprisingly, the Chinese representative on the economic side of the talks, Vice Premier Wang Yang, cracked a few jokes. He compared his new relationship with U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to a marriage, adding, "Although U.S. law permits same-sex marriage, this is not what Jacob Lew and I want." (After this joke, and one about the divorce between Rupert Murdoch and his Chinese wife, Wendi Deng, "Lew briefly smiled down at his notes … but many members of the Chinese delegation squirmed," according to Reuters.)

Reminiscing about what has changed in the United States since his last visit a decade ago, Wang added that "Americans are still taller than the Chinese and still have a stronger body and longer noses than the Chinese. [So] nothing much has changed" (here are the comments in Chinese). Wang appears to be referencing the common Chinese expression "big nose," which is a catchall term for Western foreigners. In March 2012, for example, Wang said that Guangdong province, where he was then Communist Party secretary, developed because of the assistance from Chinese living overseas, "as big noses don’t understand China."

Wang’s remarks this week appear to have been too benign and too general — he referred to Americans as a whole, as opposed to any particular segment of the American population thought to have big noses — to have caused a stir in the United States. But what matters for Wang is how his remarks played domestically. If Lew had told an audience of Chinese that "they are as small and as flat-nosed" as he remembered, he might be looking for a new job. In China, where political correctness rarely extends to race — for Jews, blacks, and Chinese minorities, among others — Wang’s joke probably won’t be considered offensive.

One does wonder, though, whether Chinese leaders will censure Wang for distracting attention from the Strategic and Economic Dialogue itself. His wisecracks certainly seem to have received as much attention as his policies. Whereas the website of China Radio International, a Chinese state radio company, headlined an article on the meeting "Good Sino-U.S. Co-op Promotes World Peace and Prosperity: Wang Yang," the Atlantic-owned business website Quartz titled its coverage "Wang Yang kicks off US-China dialogue with no-homo diplomacy."