BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, Brunei — When Michelle Obama addressed the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night in Charlotte, N.C., it was already Wednesday morning in Beijing, and Hillary Rodham Clinton was meeting with China’s president in the Great Hall of the People.

When her husband, former President Bill Clinton, spoke the following night, she was meeting with East Timor’s foreign minister after touring an American-financed coffee cooperative in Dili, the capital of the young island nation between the Banda and Timor Seas.

When President Obama accepts the Democratic nomination for a second term on Thursday night, she will be here in Brunei, half a world away from a quadrennial exercise she has not missed since Hubert H. Humphrey Jr. won the nod in her hometown, Chicago, in 1968.

Mrs. Clinton — once and, some fervently hope, a future standard-bearer for the Democratic Party — has spent the past week doing what she has done ever since Mr. Obama chose her as his secretary of state nearly four years ago: forswearing partisan politics in favor of foreign policy.