As U.S.-China tensions boil, Xi Jinping invites Iowa farmers to dinner

The future leader of China was eyeing his tractor, so Rick Kimberley broke protocol to ask: Want to hop on?

Xi Jinping wasn’t supposed to touch the equipment - his advance team feared mishaps - but the Iowa soybean farmer couldn’t resist offering a ride on the bright green John Deere 9520.

“He went right for that tractor,” Kimberley recalled this week, “and you saw this big smile on his face.”

Xi’s 2012 visit to the tiny town of Maxwell - about a year before he rose from vice president to command the world’s second largest economy - kicked off an unlikely, decade-long friendship. Now the men are scheduled to meet again Wednesday at a San Francisco dinner with far higher stakes.

Given the fraught U.S.-China relations, one of the few groups openly pleased to see Xi during his first stateside visit in six years is a mix of Iowans whom the leader has called his “old friends.” Some hosted him nearly four decades ago, when Xi was a junior official from Hebei Province on a tour of America’s heartland, offering him plates of scrambled eggs and bacon as well as a spare bedroom adorned with Star Wars figurines. Others met him years later when, as a rising political star, he returned to the same rural scene.

The California reunion is set to follow Xi’s meeting with President Biden as both sides attempt to repair relations damaged by a bitter trade war, fierce technology competition, a spy balloon blowup and the Chinese military’s escalating aggression in the South China Sea and around Taiwan. Cranking up the pressure on Beijing is now a bipartisan stance, with Biden calling Xi a “dictator” this summer and GOP presidential hopefuls blasting China as the top national security threat. Even the countries’ cherished, half-century panda diplomacy has fallen apart.

These days, 83 percent of Americans harbor a negative opinion of China, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll - a sharp increase from 2017, when Xi last landed on American soil to meet with then-president Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. (That trip was well before the pandemic, of course, which Trump would blame on China with rhetoric that experts say encouraged widespread harassment of Asian Americans.)

Yet respect for Xi among his “old friends” has held steady, said Kimberley, a fifth-generation farmer who’s now 72.

While the blitz of tariffs targeting China rocked his business in 2018 when the price of soybeans fell by about a third, Kimberly said he never took the geopolitical feud personally. He understood Trump’s desire to seek a better deal, along with China’s decision to strike back - even though both economies suffered.

As for the other issues, he thinks those are for world leaders to handle.

“Could China do better? Yes,” he said before boarding his Tuesday flight to San Francisco. “That is why we need to do what we can to build up the relationship.”

Iowa’s economic development arm had arranged the visit to Kimberley’s 4,000 acres of cropland 11 years ago. He remembers Xi as polite and curious, and when the farmer invited him onto the tractor, he didn’t hesitate.

“He didn’t even wait for the translator,” Kimberley said. “He understood immediately and got right up there.”

A photographer captured the moment, which - after Xi ascended to the presidency 13 months later - turned the farm into a magnet for Chinese tourists. Hundreds have visited to snap a picture with the now-defunct John Deere 9520.

“It’s a museum piece these days,” Kimberley said.

A “friendship farm” modeled after his property later opened in Hebei, and the Iowan who’d never been to China before meeting Xi has now visited 25 times, sharing his techniques with farmers there.

This week’s dinner invitation to Kimberley and other Iowans who Xi befriended decades ago signals a shift from his more confrontational posturing, said Jonathan Hassid, a political science professor at Iowa State University who focuses on Chinese influence.

During the trade war and pandemic, the leader’s Communist Party routinely clashed with the United States as a chief adversary. Now foreign investment in China is faltering. Meeting Biden and American business leaders on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco could be the start of a reset.

“It seems like the message has gone out to tone things down,” Hassid said. “A visit with soybean farmers is a good way to humanize him.”

Xi’s very first trip sprang from a Sister States partnership between Iowa and Hebei, which brought him and other delegates over from the province. The year was 1985, and China was opening to the global market. The group wanted to learn more about U.S. food processing.

A Des Moines businessman volunteered to drive the visitors in a cargo van around Iowa. One stop took them to a fast-food joint. Everyone got his own bucket of fried chicken.

“A lot of everyday occurrences were piquing their interest,” said Luca Berrone, the economic development official turned chauffeur. “Like the portion sizes - how large they all were.”

Berrone wanted to show them his wife’s hometown of Muscatine, but its only hotel was fully booked for a sales conference. So locals agreed to open their homes to the delegates. Xi told the hosts: “You are America to me.”

The impression stuck with Berrone, who also received an invitation to dine this week with the Chinese president. He has since led dozens more exchange programs with guests from China, which he views as “another world power we have to relate to.”

“The overall well-being of the world hangs in the balance,” he said.

Gary Dvorchak was studying computer science at the University of Iowa when his parents lent Xi his childhood bedroom for two nights. It had green shag carpet, football-themed wallpaper and Star Wars memorabilia galore.

“This was the room of a high school boy,” he said. “I left for college, and it was frozen in time.”

Xi didn’t complain. Dvorchak’s mother cooked breakfast for the budding politician. His sister - 14 at the time - asked Xi about his favorite American movies. He told her he hadn’t seen any yet.

The Midwestern hospitality must have touched him, Dvorchak said. In 2015, Xi flew the family to Beijing for an eight-course meal at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse. They all posed for a photo with Xi and his wife.

When a job at Dvorchak’s investor relations firm opened 10 years ago in Beijing, he swiftly applied, noting his special connection to Xi. He went on to raise both of his daughters in the Chinese capital.

Lately, his American friends have been asking if he still feels safe in China. “Some people would say I drank the Kool-Aid,” he said, “and I totally admit to that in the sense that I see things from their point of view as well as ours.”

At the Wednesday dinner, he doesn’t intend to mention anything heavy. If he and Xi have a private conversation, Dvorchak guesses they will discuss his elderly parents, who no longer fly and couldn’t make it to California.

This spring, he bought back his childhood home in Muscatine from a developer who’d remodeled it as a “Sino-US friendship house.” The tourist attraction had fallen into disrepair during the pandemic.

Dvorchak plans to reopen it as a museum.