Jeb Bush said that the first lady insulted China by worrying about her daughter's science project. | AP Photo Jeb Bush mispronounces the name of Obama's daughter

In sharing an anecdote about cultural differences with China on Tuesday, Jeb Bush mispronounced the name of President Barack Obama's eldest daughter, and flubbed the date of the anecdote.

Remarking upon his travels in China since 2007 and the need to work collaboratively with Beijing on issues of mutual national-security interests like North Korea, Bush remarked to the Council on Foreign Relations that the Chinese "have no clue about us. And frankly, we have no clue about them. And that difference can create all sorts of bad outcomes."


"The best example — seems like a small thing — is in 2009 after the president’s reelection. There was the summit in Palm Springs, and Mrs. Obama didn’t go to the summit," the former governor of Florida said, apparently referring to the 2013 summit in California between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping, who was accompanied by First Lady Peng Liyuan in June 2013.

Scandal erupted in China, Bush remarked, because "Mrs. Obama and the United States government, and the United States, therefore, were insulting China and its first couple by not being there."

"And every meeting I had in Beijing started out for the first 10 minutes started out lambasting me about why it was, as an American, why it was that we insulted China. And I’m thinking, you know what, it could be that Mrs. Obama was worried about the science project of Malala," Bush remarked, appearing to pronounce the first name of Obama's daughter like that of Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai.

It was not, apparently, the first time Bush had made the error. An ABC News reporter who pointed out the mistake on Twitter also tweeted on Jan. 5 that Bush pronounced her name similarly.

