Title: Beer-Pong Diplomacy: A Diplomat's Guide to Drinking in China.

• Author: Sandhaus, Derek

Text:

It's rare that I receive a summons to brief senior diplomats. You see I'm a writer and what is referred to as a "trailing spouse" in the U.S. Foreign Service. So when my diplomat wife informed me that the Consul General and his deputy would like to meet with me, no one was more surprised than I.

When I learned what they had in mind it all made more sense: They wanted me to tell them how to drink, more specifically how to drink in the Chinese manner.

We were posted to Chengdu, the mist-shrouded capital of Sichuan Province. The city holds a special place in the Chinese imagination. It is beloved for its leafy, bamboo-lined parks and its fiendishly spicy cuisine. It is also the center of the world's largest alcohol industry, which annually pumps out approximately 10 billion liters of a colorless but pungent grain liquor called baijiu. Though a mystery to most of the world's drinkers, baijiu is served alongside food at nearly all major professional and social gatherings in China.

The Consul General was not a drinker. I knew this because I had discussed it with a junior officer who willingly served as his designated drinker, when protocol required. Yet the CG requested my advice to better understand both how baijiu is made and consumed--and he was right to do so. For if one is to conduct diplomacy effectively in Sichuan, let alone in China, one must understand the basics of Chinese drinking culture.

As early as 7,000 BCE, tribes in what is today central China began producing alcoholic beverages, long before peoples elsewhere. These prehistoric Chinese used alcohol in their religious ceremonies, toasting the gods and spirits to reassert their place in the cosmic hierarchy. As China developed into an elaborate secular bureaucracy, drink too came down to earth. Drinking wine was used to demonstrate respect and fealty, and a shared toast could reinforce an alliance or make friends of enemies.

Drink was not undertaken lightly. The ancient Chinese saw alcohol as a potent tool, a gift from the gods, and thus established rules to govern every aspect of its use. These customs instructed drinkers in everything from where to sit at the table to when to drink, and how deeply. Violations of drinking etiquette were once punishable by death, though today one is more likely to be punished with three shots of baijiu in quick succession. And from the beginning, an alcoholic transgression was seen as the worst kind of diplomatic faux pas: When an emissary of the Lu Kingdom presented a rival...