When America and China Were Friendlier—and 10,000 Soldiers Built a Bike Track

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Once upon a time, a U.S. president asked his aides for one thing before his trip to Beijing: a chance to be seen as a regular guy.It was 2005, a relatively warm chapter in U.S.-China relations, and George W. Bush was a passionate mountain biker.

So Dennis Wilder, then the senior director for East Asian affairs at the National Security Council, had an idea. “Why not arrange a ride with China’s national mountain biking team?” Wilder said.Beijing at the time was planning to host the 2008 Olympics, and Wilder asked the CIA whether the Olympic mountain-biking track had been built yet. The agency came back with good news and bad news: it had a satellite photo of the site, but construction hadn’t started.Wilder called Sandy Randt, the U.S.

ambassador in Beijing. No problem, he was told. Two days later, 10,000 People’s Liberation Army soldiers were deployed to build the track.

It was finished in two weeks—trees planted and everything.“Whatever you want,” Wilder recalled in a recent interview. “You want a mountain bike track, we’ll get you one.”That was then.As President Trump prepares to travel to Beijing for a May 14-15 summit with Xi Jinping—the first state visit by a U.S. president to China in nearly a decade—the behind-the-scenes machinery of summit planning looks very different from the days when the two countries could still, occasionally, surprise each other with generosity.

The logistics remain as punishing as ever. The goodwill is harder to find.Wilder later oversaw Bush’s 2008 Beijing Olympics visit—what he calls “sheer hell,” a logistical beast involving not just Bush but his father, former President George H.W. Bush, and Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state who helped open