The 21-minute China speech that helped forge Clinton’s identity on the world stage

Flying across the Pacific on an Air Force jet bound for Beijing, first lady Hillary Clinton huddled deep into the night with a few aides and advisers, honing her speech for the UN Fourth World Conference on Women.

It was 1995, and it had been a bruising first few years in the White House: Troopergate, Travelgate, Whitewater. Not to mention the failure of her own high-profile efforts — unprecedented for a first lady — to reform the nation’s health care system.

Even her trip to China provoked controversy. There were objections in some quarters to a first lady wading into tricky diplomatic waters and addressing issues like human rights abuses. Some in Congress called the conference “anti-family” and felt the United States shouldn’t be attending at all. Some feared offending the Chinese with criticism; others feared the hosts might use the US participation — and the first lady’s — as propaganda.

In the end, Clinton decided to make the trip, hoping to “push the envelope as far as I can on behalf of women and girls”.

“All eyes were now on Beijing, and I knew that all eyes would be on me, too,” she writes in her memoir, Living History.