Men of Fortune

Men of Fortune
Back to the future with Bill Clinton, Jiang Zemin and AOL Time Warner.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, April 26, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

No business conference is complete these days without a couple of high-profile politicians, and this year's Fortune Global Forum, planned for May 8-10 in Hong Kong, sports a pair almost too well matched to be true: Bill Clinton and China's President Jiang Zemin.

Mr. Jiang will deliver the opening keynote address. Mr. Clinton will deliver the closing keynote. You might wonder why there are two keynotes--a keynote being by definition singular. But don't worry. Mr. Clinton spent years letting Mr. Jiang call the tune, and between them during the 1990s, they developed their own sort of Sino-American sing-along, rich in give and take. Chinese officials gave money to Mr. Clinton's campaigns, and the Chinese government took a load of missile technology and nuclear secrets from America. Bill smiled and talked about "strategic partnership" and in 1998 visited Tiananmen Square. There was a kind of rhythm to it all.

Besides, apart from a few little details--like the recent plane standoff, and China's massive military buildup, and Beijing's threats to Taipei, and China's worsening religious and political repression, and the imprisonment of a slew scholars who are U.S. citizens or residents--well, what's to fret about?

But I digress. Along with serving as a pair of big-name bookends for the actual content of the conference, these two politicians have something even more important in common: They happen to share the distinction of being two of the most washed-up bigshots on the planet. At a conference entitled "Next Generation: Asia" and devoted to the future, they stand out in artful contrast as yesterday's news.

Folks, even if Mr. Jiang looks like a handy guy to know when closing business deals in China, that doesn't make him a father of modern Asia. He's an old communist whose big career moves included shutting down Shanghai's World Economic Herald and endorsing the official killings that ended the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. These days Mr. Jiang's main job consists of fighting to keep his perch as top boss of a communist police state--not, one hopes, the kind of thing that will look great on a 21st-century résumé.

As for Mr. Clinton, his most visionary contribution to the modern age was his astounding skill at finding ways to cash in on the U.S. presidency and disrespect the public trust. By now it's dawned on even many of Mr. Clinton's fiercest former supporters that his historic moves in the White House consisted mainly of such feats as pardoning March Rich, and getting himself impeached for lying under oath.

To be fair to the Fortune forum, I doubt that the parent company and host, AOL Time Warner, invited these two speakers with an eye to endorsing their individual creeds. More likely the aim was to honor the genuine enterprise and potential of both the Chinese and American people. Heads and former heads of state, deserving or not, are time-honored symbols. And it's just plain easier to draw a crowd with Messrs. Jiang and Clinton than with most of the truly deserving Americans and Chinese who actually handle the productive end of the future-building business. "We really think of it as an opportunity to bring some of the people to talk about some of the big challenges for business globally," says Terry McDevitt, an international executive of AOL Time Warner.

Sandwiched between the two pontificating pillars of the past will be a day and a half of panels on modernization, with an audience described by the Fortune forum Web site as "limited to chairmen, CEOs and top managing directors of major multinational corporations." It should have its intriguing moments. AOL Time Warner's CEO, Gerald Levin, who at the Fortune Global Forum two years ago in Shanghai introduced Mr. Jiang as "my good friend," will have to decide if he really wants to do that again. Last time, Mr. Levin was rewarded with a keynote speech in which Mr. Jiang spelled out his vision for China's future this way: "We oppose any efforts by any country to impose its own social system and ideology on another country."

This is what I'd call bad timing. The moment for China to be disdaining foreign notions was when its Communist Party was studying up on how to import the Soviet system half a century back. Today, surely folks of Fortune forum caliber are sharp enough to notice that it's not the West (and it sure wasn't Bill Clinton) pushing for freedom in China; it's the Chinese people (who, by the way, Mr. Jiang banned from traveling into Hong Kong for the duration of the Fortune conference).

This year, also, media minimogul James Murdoch, son of Rupert Murdoch and CEO of his father's Hong Kong-based Star Group Ltd., will appear on a panel entitled, "Next Generation Leaders Look Ahead." The young Mr. Murdoch not so long ago did some looking ahead as a speaker at a Milken Institute conference in California, during which he advised anyone dealing with China to get ahead by shutting up and putting up with whatever the "absolutist" government of China might want.

There's something to be said, of course, for a free exchange of views, though whether that will be the keynote Mr. Jiang sets is debatable. During the 1999 Fortune forum, AOL Time Warner's very own Time magazine was forward-looking enough to publish articles by Chinese dissidents Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan, an act that got that edition of Time banned in China.

But apart from whatever looking ahead Mr. Clinton may be doing as he collects another fat speaking fee, it's hard to see what either his presence or that of Mr. Jiang (who as a sitting head of state gets no fee) has to do with enriching the future of anybody but themselves and maybe a couple of pals with tickets to this conference.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."