Public Diplomacy Fail: In Which I Visit The Repellent U.S. Embassy In Beijing, Have Words With a State Department Employee and Learn A Possible Way To Short-Circuit The Onerous New Passport Form

The three-year-old United States Embassy in Beijing is a disgrace.

Rarely have I seen a building that so aggressively wants people to stay away. A blank concrete wall is one of the most callous expressions in architecture, and the embassy has plenty. From street level, the compound – which consumes one of Beijing’s massive Stalinist blocks – is all reinforced barriers and security walls. It’s part of a Bush-era initiative to construct a new generation of U.S. embassies which are intended to be daunting fortresses.

The physical security measures are simultaneously overdone and worthless. The building is a three-dimensional portrait of the United States as a paranoid authoritarian state. Nearby are the embassies for Israel and Germany, which looked inviting and intriguing, which look like places to go for seminars and canapés — and I’m sure those guys are no slouches when it comes to security.

Yet all that rebar won’t protect American assets. If the People’s Liberation Army wanted to storm the compound, they could do it in minutes. Having 2.2 million troops gives you that kind of edge. Who else in China is a physical threat to a US building? The Tibetans love the United States, the ragtag separatists from Xinjiang and other minority enclaves within the PRC don’t have that kind of firepower, and the Chinese have every incentive and tool needed to stop a terrorist network from perpetrating an attack in their capital.

The U.S. should protect its workers, equipment and data. But one point of diplomacy should also be to make the locals like you, and that could start by designing an embassy that doesn’t look like a blast shelter from Mordor.

* * *

I was there to have additional visa pages added to my passport.

If you look at your passport, you’ll see there are two types of blank pages. Some are labeled Visas at the top, and a few are labeled Amendments and Endorsements on the side. As you cross borders, immigration officers are supposed to stamp only the pages labeled Visas. When those are filled, you need to have more pages added.

The service used to be free. You could walk unannounced into most U.S. embassies or consulates, and the Foreign Service employees would add pages as you waited. The extra pages were often embossed with the office seal, so there are a (very) few Americans out there with pages carrying the seals of obscure outposts like Embassy Ashgabat or Consulate Guayaquil.

Since July of last year, that simple service costs $82. At many embassies, you have to make an appointment first. As it happens, the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong will only mail the passport – which I don’t like – so I decided to have the pages added in-person in Beijing.

* * *

The first checkpoint was the gate. A small crowd of Chinese was clamoring about something, but the guard let me pass when I flashed my passport.

The second checkpoint consisted of a guard confirming my appointment from a printed list. The third checkpoint was more formal, inside a building, with a walk-through magnetometer and an x-ray machine to screen bags. My mobile phone was confiscated by the guard, who gave me a laminated number to retrieve it later.

The American Citizens Services area was on the second floor, and it was an insult. In an enormous complex – the second-largest U.S. embassy in the world — the area reserved for its citizens could barely fit a dozen people. It was a Brutalist room of exposed steel and girders and tinted glass, and there were a few cheap chairs along the wall.

The workers were behind thick bullet-proof glass counters, like at a bank. One teller window was built out into a tiny “interview room” –- a cell, really — for parents registering newborns. There were no amenities, and the embassy workers kept to their side of the partitions, talking through a PA system with worse static and weaker sound than a Jack in the Box.

The atmosphere was that of a modern prison visitors room.

* * *

“My possession of a passport is not contingent on disclosing my employer,” I said.

The embassy lady, a middle-aged Chinese-American woman, was not happy when I gave her the application form for additional visa pages. DS-4085 demands to know your occupation, employer and emergency contact. I left those spaces blank.

“I need the form to be completely filled out,” she said.

“There are very clear rules for a passport, and I don’t have to provide that information to obtain more pages,” I said.

She said hold on, and I waited. When she returned she said, “Put a strike through those sections. Otherwise, they’re going to blame me for the form not being filled out.”

So that’s what I did, and, about fifteen minutes later, I had 24 (ugly) pages added to my passport.

* * *

Striking out sections makes sense. I did not want to write “Not Applicable” because a prosecutor could claim that’s a false statement. For example, if you are employed but write “N.A.” in the Occupation box, a zealous AUSA can claim you lied.

A strike-through has an elegance. It communicates that you’ve seen that portion of the form, and that you are not answering it. A non-verbal symbol is less likely to be twisted into a false statement by a reader in bad faith.

Strike-outs are a possible way of dealing with the onerous new passport application form that the State Department is attempting to institute. Faced with pages of intrusive and nonsensical questions like “Did your mother receive pre-natal or post-natal medical care?”, it may make sense to strike out everything except relevant citizenship information (“Place of birth”).

In any event, the United States spent half a billion dollars on a Beijing embassy with two messages: The Chinese are not to be trusted, and neither are our citizens.