Chinese Leader’s One-Man Show Complicates Diplomacy

choi

Jane Perlez, 习近平为中美关系加入个人色彩. 纽约时报中文网, July 9, 2014
cn.nytimes.com/china/20140709/c09diplomacy/


, which is translated from

Jane Perlez, Chinese Leader’s One-Man Show Complicates Diplomacy; A series of moves reflects Xi's vision for China, analysts say. New York Times, July 9, 2014.

Quote:

(a) “an American-Chinese relationship rived by a strategic rivalry not seen before, a situation that neither side appears in the mood to improve.

“Complicating matters is the one-man leadership style of President Xi Jinping, who appears to make the big decisions on national security — meant to challenge American primacy in the Asia-Pacific region and establish a China-centric alternative — without much consultation with others, Chinese and American experts say.

(b) “The atmosphere between Beijing and Washington has deteriorated to such an extent since Mr. Xi and President Obama met at the Sunnylands estate in California a year ago that * * *

(c) “A much ballyhooed national security commission set up by Mr. Xi has turned out to be focused more on domestic policy than on foreign, Chinese analysts say.

Note:
(a) The Chinese title (“个人色彩”) is much milder than the English one (“One-Man Show”).

(b) “The policy preferences of Mr Wang [Huning] — whom one Chinese academic referred to as ‘merely a desk officer’ — are little known.”

The cn.nytimes.com translates the sentence this way: “被一位中国学者形容为 ‘充其量只是个文胆’ 的王沪宁，在政策上的偏好鲜有人知.”

文胆 is wrong.

desk officer (n): "a military officer who is not assigned to active duty"
WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart collection. © 2003-2012 Princeton University, Farlex Inc
www.thefreedictionary.com/desk+officer

(c) “A Navy admiral, SUN Jianguo 孙 建国, appears to have the blessing of Mr Xi, or at least the top levels of government [at least in certain aspects] said Evans JR Revere, a former principal deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia. Admiral Sun, who is deputy chief of the general staff of the People’s Liberation Army * * *”
(i) “Fluent in Chinese, Korean and Japanese, Revere retired from the Foreign Service in 2007 after a distinguished career as one of the US Department of State's top Asia experts.”
(ii) The surname Revere may be (i) “French: variant of Rivière, Rivoire, or Rivier, topographic name for someone living on the banks of a river, French rivier ‘bank,’” or (ii) “English: topographic name for someone who lived on the brow of a hill, from a misdivision of the Middle English phrase atter evere ‘at the brow or edge’ (from Old English yfer, efer ‘edge’).”

The English portion is a bit confusing, because brow as a noun in that context has two definitions.

brow (n): “the top part [or 'summit,' as Oxford dictionaries says] of a hill or the edge of something high such as a cliff or rock <the brow of the hill>"
dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/brow_2