Watch: Obama And Romney Talk China At Third Presidential Debate, Plus Analysis From Joseph Stiglitz

At the third and final presidential debate on Monday, Governor Mitt Romney backed off claims he made in the previous debate to go hard on China. But as New Yorker’s Evan Osnos notes, “But in China, to be frank, nobody takes it all that seriously. Romney’s tack toward the middle in his final debate (a theme that my colleague John Cassidy explores in his post today) seemed to foreshadow to a Chinese audience the kind of softening that is consistent with a pattern that has run through three decades of American foreign policy: candidates who rail against China on the stump rarely follow through if they win, because China stops being a convenient foil and becomes instead a complicated reality.” (The rest of that article respectfully paints Romney as utterly clueless and generally wrong when it comes to China.)

If you’d like to hear Obama and Romney’s discussion about this country, Wall Street Journal has you covered with the above video (on Youku for those in China after the jump).

And then watch Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist, talk to Reuters about Romney’s “scary” stance toward China and the potential trade war that America would probably lose.

Stiglitz:

(H/T Malcolm Riddell)

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