Read these interviews on PBS NewsHour with some remarkably astute students of international politics in Beijing, and you’ll conclude that these young Chinese are as patriotic as Americans, and pretty brilliant in their own right: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/jan-june11/chinayouth_01-20.html. Says the one student: “Democracy is an absolute value in U.S., but it might be not that absolute in other countries.”

Then read my new WND.COM column, “Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense” (http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=253617) in which I conclude, among other things, that President Obama need not be bashed for holding a state dinner in honor of the Chinese President Hu Jintao. “Civility is not a weakness,” said John F. Kennedy in his Inaugural Address fifty years ago. Obama was civil, not weak.

Here’s an excerpt from “Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense” :

“… It so happens that China’s current financial difficulties are a consequence of a self-defeating devotion to the US dollar. America’s monetary policy, aimed at devaluing the dollar, is hurting China, whose currency is pegged to ours. ‘In order to maintain the peg,” explains financier Peter Schiff, ‘China must continually buy dollars on the open market. But the weaker the dollar gets, the more dollars China must buy.'”

So as to keep purchasing greenbacks, China is inflating its own money supply. However, inflation in China and the attendant price hikes — brought about because of the debased dollar — could threaten the stability of a country that has ‘moved more people out of poverty in the shortest amount of time in the history of the planet.'”

Diplomat that he is, China’s head of state refrained from raising this indelicate matter. For that alone, President Hu Jintao deserves dinner.” …

The complete column is “Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense,” now on WND.COM.

UPDATE I (Jan. 22): As an outsider in American society—at least this is the way I’m often treated—I’m more sensitive to the way my fellow Americans treat certain Others, other than browns and blacks. If you are a brown or a black, you have it made. Americans generally feel good about themselves when they patronize needy minorities, into which category the Chinese do not neatly fit.

Our one reader, below, emblematic of most, describes Hu Jintao as the same as our politicians. I see this blanket statement as American chauvinism: an inability to look at other peoples and cultures except through the American prism. It pisses me off as much as that big fat mama pissed me off at the gym, when she spoke slowly at me, as she informed me I had done too many sets on a weight-pushing apparatus. Why did she speak to me as one would to a retarded child? Because I spoke back in a different accent to hers. In other words, if one differs from an American, one might as well be from Deep Space.

Has anyone bothered to read a bit about Hu Jintao? You could indeed argue that he is every bit as bad as our lot; but you’d be wrong to ignore how different are his life experience, work background, and education.

Imagine an American politician that isn’t a slimy lawyer, but a hydraulic engineering from “humble origins,” who excelled at school in singing and dancing? Imagine an American politician whose father “was denounced during the Cultural Revolution?

Why not analyze what these differences portend?

Read about the man before you resort to pat pabulum. Among the Chinese I’ve talked to in the US (American citizens who’ve lived through turmoil back in China), Hu Jintao is viewed as a reformer, slowly shepherding a billion people toward peaceful progress as best possible. Chinese, who tend to be statist, seem to think of Hu Jintao as capitalistic.

As observed in “US In The Red And Getting Redder”: “The picture of China to emerge from behind those pretty Chinese screens is complex. The embodiment of feng shui it is not. The trend, however, is unmistakable: China is becoming freer, America less free. The devil is in this detail”:

China has undergone considerable economic restructuring and market reforms, the consequence of which is a 300 million strong Chinese middle class. Poverty levels have receded from “53 percent in 1981 to 8 percent in 2001. Only about a third of the economy is now directly state-controlled. As of 2005, 70 percent of China’s GDP was in the private sector.” The Chinese financial system is duly being liberalized—banking is diversifying and stock markets are developing. Protections for private property rights are being strengthened as well.

UPDATE II: LOOK WHO’S TALKING. Via LewRockwell.com:

“From TSA feel-ups to ubiquitous surveillance cameras, from email and phone eavesdropping to assassination squads, from torture to secret prisons, from a massive expansion in the police state to bigger government in general, from illegal searches and seizures to illegal wars, President Hu questioned the US human rights record.

Oh, wait a minute. It wasn’t that at all. It was this. (Thanks to Ravindran Kuppusamy.)

UPDATE from Daniel Mahaffey:

Hu didn’t mention the US government’s human rights abuses because either a) he is a gentleman who did not wish to insult his host, b) given his own government’s predilections, he doesn’t see the actions of the US government as abusive, or c) as he said in his prepared remarks, governments should not meddle in the affairs of other governments. I don’t tend to quote Christian scripture often, but among the things Jesus of Nazareth said were these two relevant instructions: 1) Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. John 8:7, and 2) Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. Matt 7:5. Perhaps Mr. Obama is unfamiliar with these concepts.

UPDATE III (Jan. 23): Today, The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard raises the issue I raised here yesterday (see “UPDATE I”):

“Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Mr Hu a ‘dictator’. Is this a remotely apposite term for a self-effacing man of Confucian leanings, whose father was a victim of the Cultural Revolution, who fights a daily struggle against his own hotheads at home, and who will hand over power in an orderly transition next year?”