“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…
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.
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