printRead 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?”
How nonsensical the conservative fad to stick it up the nose of those we depend upon for financial support. At some point, Daddy will decide the money is better spent on what he likes and revoke our credit card.
And what gives Asia the competitive edge over America’s manufacturers? Perhaps America’s 50+ percent tax rate, 60-70% non-productive oink sector, and more rules than Fizzbin.
Regarding the “debt” to China, let those who borrowed pay: the government oinkers. The American Capitalist who has not taken any government money owes nothing to China, or any other international creditors for that matter.
To my knowledge, it was the Bush Sr. that gave China “Most favored trading partner nation” status. And they keep renewing it, yet at the same time they whine about how China is the bad guy. Shoot yourself in the foot politics.
My regard for China is not influenced by “the green-eyed monster.” But neither is it influenced by rose-colored glasses.
China is foremost a country managed by a single-party, a ruling elite, the Communist Party of China. Yes, the current Party elite is much more economically enlightened than the former bunch. This elite had the foresight to hitch its wagon to the US and its currency to the Dollar. The result: a huge and ready-made export market eager to invest capital in a repressed giant. All the ruling elite had to do is plow this capital into enormous state-owned enterprises that cater to the gluttonous American diet. Cheap labor was available and a given. The Chinese “miracle” was born and continues to thrive.
This scheme worked out for the US ruling elite as well. The Democrepublicans in Washington saw an opportunity by which they could spend themselves silly, massively increase the public debt and rely on their Chinese counterparts to take them off the hook by buying $-trillions in government paper.
This relationship between ruling elites is hardly symbiotic. I would describe it more accurately as an uneasy truce between gangsters. Think of the truce between Al Capone and Bugs Moran in the roaring 20’s.
The truth is such alliances of convenience between gangsters never end well. As sure as tomorrow the Chinese miracle will fizzle. The growing inflation within China will create pressure on the ruling elite to unhitch the Yuan from the Dollar. Consequently, their massive export-oriented capital investments will sour. A young and ambitious entrepreneurial class that the elite allowed to flourish will grow restless. Likewise, the vast number of rural peasants, untouched by the Chinese miracle and most affected by price inflation. Pressure will mount on the ruling elite to cede real economic and political power to the people. But this the Communist Party elite will never do.
The story in the US will be similar. Faced with a collapse of the dollar, the US ruling elite will soon learn the hard way that their jig is up.
What happens next? Maybe the ruling thugocracis in each country will peaceably and politely get together again over lunch to discuss how they might pull their respective butts from the ringer they themselves created.
On the other hand, a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre is a distinct possibility.
China is not nice. Hu is a politician. Politicians of any flavor by definition are not nice. They are uninteresting, middle of the road entities with no allegiance to anything other than themselves.
China is in the game to make money and is jockeying for position in the Governopoly Game. It looks as if they just bought Bank Walk and Dork Place!
Obama has one more corner to turn on the game board, and is a Snake-Eyes away from going to jail. The next traverse is no moonwalk – he’s facing the possibility of some BIG rent!
The time for repast is past. The question is: Was his attempt at insurance obsequious or obsequies?
ALFREDA ZHANG: we don’t need superpowers.. it has to coerce other countries to do things they don’t like. – WELL SAID!!!
When I strolled around Beijing and Guangzhou, I noted how people went around their daily lives in subways, restaurants, and stores quite similar to Boston and Washington. OK, they live under a one-party authoritarian government and we have a two-party authoritarian government.
The American government tolerates a limited amount of politically inane bloviation by each party about the other party which does not exist in China. But in the last 25 years, our government has invaded and occupied nations on 4 different continents that did not attack us. We outspend the entire world combined in armaments and maintain troops in scores of nations. We open e-mails, monitor phone calls, bribe foreign officials, entrap ordinary Americans, and arrest hundreds of thousands of users of “illicit substances”. We have embargoed over 60 nations for various misbehavior.
Apparently, China’s misbehavior entitles the American government to coercively extract money from American citizens (or, ironically, borrow it from China) in order to “threaten” or “berate” China over its Jeffersonian “peaceful relations with all” international policies or its internal lack of “human rights”.
[BRAVO!]
It’s my turn to be confused. On one hand you excoriate my characterization of Hu as a politician, and on the other, you rain kudos on someone who sees the Chinese who’s day to day business varies little from American’s. It seems to me that what holds for the Chinese populace holds for Chinese politicians too.
Hu may be a nice guy and use the right fork to eat his salad, but he’s still a politician. He represents a government, and government’s business, it’s only business, is managing wealth. Hu trades in other peoples wealth. Success in politics seems to correlate closely to success on the DSM MACH IV test. [We don’t disagree. But it’s up to the Chinese to deal with their leaders. We should fret about our own tyrants.]
Hu and Obama are essentially mirror images except that one is a winner and the other is a loser. They’re traders. If this were the 18th century, they’d probably line up well together in the slave business.
China seems in line to inherit world dominance from the US. The US looked good in 1939 (Lindbergh et al.). In another 50 years, the Chinese will appear to the world as did the Japanese on a US WWII propaganda poster. Who’ll be the next Hu? An Indian? A Venezuelan?
In 100 years, all this will be only interesting history!
China is following the imperial examples set by the US post WWII. China finds itself wealthy at the expense of the US as did the US with failure in Europe just as the Europeans …. . The Chinese have been buying their way into Africa and South America, ingratiating themselves by investing their pelf. Most of the inroads have been targeted at fuel and mineral rich nations.
Their military complex is hot with new technology and boiling over with materiel – stealth fighters, submarines, missiles, an aircraft carrier. They’re moving army units into North Korea. No parallel there! Ya think?
The US and China are swapping positions! They’re closely approaching parity in EVERY aspect of government, except the US is in a downward trend while the sun is rising brighter east of Zulu.
The same cycle has been happening since the first civilization appeared; just the frequency is accelerating. It’s the human way!
All this while Sun-Wu Kong flits about, apparently unaware of his impending coronation!
I don’t agree Loneranger. You said that China finds itself wealthy at the expense of the US. It’s not China’s fault that we are getting poorer. It is our own government’s policies that are destroying wealth in this country. To make this out like it’s a zero sum game where one country can only get richer by making another poorer is simply not the case.
Amen Irongalt.
I’ve just returned from Minsk, Belarus where I was interviewing a libertarian dissident/economist in the wake of the recent elections.
In our off-topic discussions on the record to date of former communist countries transitioning to market economies, he talked about learning from the mistakes made.
When I asked him what mistakes in particular, he replied, “Don’t imitate the American/EU tax structure!”
China’s Innovative Way of Skinning the United States!
Mark Twain is credited with an early use of the cliché “more than one way to skin a cat” in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, as follows: “she was wise, subtle, and knew more than one way to skin a cat, that is, more than one way to get what she wanted”. Thefreedictionary.com defines beggar-thy-neighbor as: an international trade policy of competitive devaluations and increased protective barriers that one country institutes to gain at the expense of its trading partners. Under the guise of fostering ‘indigenous innovation’, the Chinese government has creatively used a non-conventional, subtle version of beggar-thy-neighbor. Its version doesn’t entail the competitive devaluation of its own currency, which would enhance China’s exports and inhibits its trading partners’ exports. China’s version perpetrates an over-valuation of the currencies of one or more of its trading partners. This negatively affects all the trade of the pegged trading partner(s), not just trade with China. During the recent period China pegged its currency to the U.S. Dollar, its version of beggar-thy-neighbor was 8 times as damaging to the U.S. economy as what the media refers to as “China keeping it currency undervalued”.
In November 2003, Warren Buffett in his Fortune, Squanderville versus Thriftville article recommended that America adopt a balanced trade model. The fact that advice advocating balance and sustainability, from a sage the caliber of Warren Buffett, could be virtually ignored for over seven years is unfathomable. Until action is taken on Buffett’s or a similar balanced trade model, America will continue to squander time, treasure and talent in pursuit of an illusionary recovery.
[During the recent period China pegged its currency to the U.S. Dollar, its version of beggar-thy-neighbor was 8 times as damaging to the U.S. economy as what the media refers to as “China keeping it currency undervalued”.] China or the whoever, is in the position of rating money also devalued the American dollar, and the US is now an AA debtor rather than an AAA debtor nation. The Dollar and the Euro are about to go belly up. China has made agreements with the Middle East Oil nations, Russia, Japan, and I think South Korea to trade in their own currencies ignoring the Euro and the US dollar. None of those countries are putting much faith in anything except themselves. In other words, the whole world’s economy is going to hell in a handbasket and there is nowhere to run. The US needs to look at itself and start getting its own house in order and quit worrying about everyone else.