Recently in the WSJ, they had an article about Chinese not being able to understand American humor. A Chinese-American comedian was explaining the problem. Part of it was that they are “face” people. They don’t make self-deprecating jokes and don’t laugh at them because that makes one lose face.
It is a western psychology approach to assume that confessing that we have problems will make someone else like us better and feel more comfortable talking to us.
Anybody who does diplomacy should be well-informed enough to know that other cultures don’t necessarily start dialogues that way. China will not feel more connected to us just because we have “issues” in our democracy. The State Department has embarrassed us again.
No, in their minds they will say to themselves "I think we're dealing with incompetents and idiots here."