As Barack Obama's failure to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp continues to anger his liberal base, interested observers outside the US are beginning to take their potshots at the reeling POTUS. The Chinese news media, for instance, has decided to lightly prod the American president with a little humor -- not with its own humor, mind you, but with The Daily Show's. ...

Ed's note: On April 19, the US Department of State published its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, which included a section on China. It was typical, mundane, and features nothing you don't already know, including restriction of Uighur and Tibetan movement, harassment of journalists and dissidents, prison labor, discrimination, extrajudicial killings, etc. On April 21, the State Council Info ...

The United States Senate has shamed itself, its country -- where 90 percent of the people can be in favor of an issue that gets defeated -- and democracy. The first two statements are indisputable. The third is a logical conclusion one could draw by looking at how the Chinese reacted to Wednesday's victory for the NRA and spineless politicians over common sense and long-overdue legislation. Evan Osnos has t ...

President Barack Obama has drawn basically positive reviews for his second inaugural address yesterday, but at least one person was not impressed. (Note: probably tens of millions were not impressed, but you can read the comments section to Hot Air and other sites devoted to the corpse of Ronald Reagan if you're interested.) We're talking about the wizard behind the curtains of Global Times, who penned this ...

Nerds of 20th-century Chinese history will love this. Brought to us by the good folks of Tea Leaf Nation, this image on Sina Weibo imagines what would happen in an election between Mao Zedong's Communist Party of China (red, obviously) and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang, which fled for Taiwan in 1949. Via TLN: The “election” began in earnest on November 8 when a widely-followed wit with a handle meaning “Pret ...

Whatever your feelings about American politics, it's hard to argue that Barack Obama doesn't shine on the big stage with the lone spotlight. The man knows how to deliver a message, and it's liable to be heard as clearly halfway around the world as by those closest to him. According to Tea Leaf Nation: In his acceptance speech in the early morning of November 7, re-elected U.S. President Barack Obama seemed ...

Via Kaiser Kuo, here's an official Durex ad on Sina Weibo that has pounced on yesterday's US presidential election results. The caption reads: "The difference between Obama and Romney is..." Ahem. Here's the ad, which was posted 12 hours ago and has been forwarded 43,714 times with 12,750 comments. I'll leave it without comment. ...

Image via Digital Trends Four more years for the big guy in charge. If you're interested in how China reacted to Barack Obama's win yesterday, we'll offer this post by Tea Leaf Nation, which translates several reactions from Sina Weibo, which is China's Twitter. But plenty of China watchers were tweeting on actual Twitter, too. We've collected some highlights: ...

The day is upon us. First, if you're in Beijing, the Beijinger has a list of places you can watch the election results tomorrow morning. Brussels opens the earliest, and probably has the most TVs (not to mention the biggest, a projection screen). Cuju, though small, opens at 8 am and has the best coffee deal on the list: 25 yuan for all-you-can-drink. They'll also be serving a special beer that's apparently ...

Another day, another Mitt Romney lie involving China. Granted, this lie was told last Thursday at a rally in Defiance, Ohio -- "I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state Jeep — now owned by the Italians — is thinking of moving all production to China" -- and it's a lie that mostly slanders Chrysler, Barack Obama, Italy, the US auto industry, and common sense, but we think it shou ...

This ad by Karl Rove and American Crossroads is yet another reminder that American politics, at its worst, is no better than Chinese politics. Watch as a narrator, most certainly white, says, "The more Obama borrows from China, the more we'll have to bow to China." Implication: bowing is a gesture of servility, American decline, and Communism, not -- as it is in the real world -- a gesture of respect and wi ...

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 ...

Jon Huntsman, the one-time presidential hopeful and former US ambassador to China, has probably said more sensible things about China to more Americans in the last year than just about anyone in the world. It was only earlier this year, after all, that he trashed his own party's approach to China, saying, "I don't know what world these people are living in." And in a very recent interview with Isaac Stone F ...

"Chinese commies are commies and China commies commies commies," Mitt Romney said at tonight's the second presidential debate. His actual words were, "China has been a currency manipulator for years and years and years," but the real point didn't require such fancy words: China equals bad, non-China equals good. And boy did Romney hammer the China part of that equation. It's a strategy as tried and true as ...

Well that didn't take long. It was in our 6 am post today that we said Huawei and/or ZTE would quickly become election fodder, and now we know how quick. The first blow comes via the Obama campaign, accusing Mitt Romney, then CEO of Bain Capital, of "putting profits from China ahead of security for America." "This whole xenophobia about Chinese companies isn't healthy or necessarily beneficial for the World ...

Neil Bush isn't nearly the public figure that two of his siblings, Jeb and George Walker, are, but as a businessman and philanthropist and son and brother of former U.S. presidents, he's made the news cycle a few times in his days. (Possibly most notably -- and unfortunately -- for a high-profile divorce in which he admitted to consorting with hookers in Thailand and Hong Kong; he may or may not have contra ...

[caption id="attachment_3798" align="alignnone" width="490" caption="Drawing by Timothy Lyster, 5th grader, Sam Houston Elementary"][/caption] This lead by Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin is pretty much the perfect example of an online magazine lead: Echoing the laments of pundits like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood argued Saturday that China outpaces the United ...

Last Friday, the State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China published a report called The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011. It was in response to the US State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011, which featured information on about 200 countries, China included. China's report, published on Xinhua, et al., was about 8,000 words. We read it ...

Pic via National Confidential There is, to be sure, an Eric Esch-sized body of evidence that Mitt Romney is a louse, but I think the scurvy wellspring of his suckiness can essentially be summed up as such: he is the archetypal American politician (no, I don't care that he's Mormon), and if you identified him as such, he'd take it as a compliment. What that means is he's willing to do and say anything to get ...