Washington’s outgoing ambassador to Beijing has ended his three-year posting on a combative note, saying Chinese travellers’ experience of freedoms and democracy during trips to the US could encourage them to “want some of those same things”.
Gary Locke is leaving Beijing at a time of heightened Sino-US tension over issues ranging from President Barack Obama’s recent meeting with the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, to Beijing’s declaration of an air defence identification zone over the East China Sea last year.
Since his appointment in 2011, Mr Locke has been at the centre of a series of diplomatic spats between China and the US, one of which led to Beijing’s highest-level political purge since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.