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... Read more »
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... Read more »
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... Read more »
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..."
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.... Read more »
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... Read more »
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 should be brought to your attention anyway in preparation for the next five days of Romney lies and the inevitable mention of Obama's half-brother in Guangzhou, Mark Ndesandjo, as evidence that the president loves him some Commie Red.
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 willingness to cooperate on difficult, complicated matters such as, oh I dunno, international fucking politics.
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."
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... Read more »
