Bush Picks Classmate As China Ambassador, Says Official

WASHINGTON, Apr 18, 2001 -- (Reuters) President George W. Bush has chosen Clark Randt Jr., a Yale classmate and expert on Chinese business, to succeed spy-plane standoff figure Joseph Prueher as U.S. ambassador to Beijing, a U.S. official said on Tuesday.

Randt is a Hong Kong-based lawyer and former commercial attache to the U.S. embassy in China. The U.S. official said Bush had decided to nominate him as ambassador to China.

Prueher, who played a central role in the resolution last week of the standoff over a U.S. reconnaissance plane that made an emergency landing in China, was appointed by Clinton in 1999 and the Bush administration had made it known before the standoff that it intended to replace him.

Randt is a lawyer with the law firm Shearman and Sterling, and a partner in the firm's mergers and acquisitions and corporate finance groups. He speaks Mandarin, according to his biography on the law firm's Web site, and served as commercial attache at the U.S. embassy in Beijing from 1982-1984.

He has represented major international corporations including G.E. Capital, Apple, and Viag AG in investment projects in China, worked on privatization of Chinese companies, and represented China-related initial public offerings on the New York Stock Exchange, the biography said.

In a Wall Street Journal article in 1999, Randt was described as the social chairman of Bush's fraternity at Yale University and was quoted in denying rumors of drug use by Bush. "We lived for Saturday night," Randt said. "We drank a lot of beer but nothing more than that."

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-- Anonymous, April 18, 2001