SHANGHAI: A rambling and expensive speech by the former US president Bill Clinton in southern China has gone down spectacularly badly, according to the Chinese press.

Many in the audience in Shenzhen, which comprised various dignitaries, found it so hard to follow that they took off the headsets providing simultaneous translation.

Mr Clinton was supposed to speak on Thursday about the “World Trade Organisation and the Chinese real estate economy” — because a local property company was paying him US dollars 250,000 for the speech.

Instead he uttered platitudes about the need for “personal understanding” between US and Chinese leaders and reminisced about his first visit to China in 1998, when he held a successful summit with the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin.

Members of the audience, who had waited for hours because his plane was delayed, then asked him about international affairs and politics. “Although he had nothing worth saying, he kept going on,” the Yangcheng Evening News commented on Friday.

Asked to predict the outcome of the Middle East crisis, Mr Clinton smiled ingenuously and confessed: “I don’t know, I really don’t know.” The entire audience, which included the mayor of Guangzhou and 300 invited foreign and Chinese guests, burst out laughing.

Mr Clinton’s chutzpah in collecting his fee without doing any homework has been widely noted. The Chinese Communist party’s official People’s Daily website reported it under the headline “Clinton reaps US dollars 250,000 in 30-minute speech in Shenzhen.”

There was no apparent note of censure in the Chinese press comment on Friday; instead, the response seemed to be a hint of admiration that he could get away with. It was noted that Mr Clinton had earned only US dollars 100,000 for a speech to the Fortune Forum in Hong Kong last year.

He arrived in China from Japan, where he received an honorary doctorate at Nihon University and lectured on globalisation. Observers in Tokyo suggest that the Japanese press would have been far too polite to say that his speech there was less than riveting.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.