I imagine they’re not alone in wanting America to go away. We certainly can be a troublesome superpower at times — especially for the running-dog, commie hegemons in Beijing.
But, really. “De-Americanize” the world? Forget our nukes and the world’s most sophisticated, powerful, professional military. Forget our $15 trillion economy. Forget the fact that American culture is voraciously consumed by most of the planet.
Never mind all that. I’ve got two words for the Chinese: blue jeans.
China’s official news agency has called for the creation of a “de-Americanised world”, saying the destinies of people should not be left in the hands of a hypocritical nation with a dysfunctional government.
Heaping criticism and caustic ridicule on Washington, the Xinhua news agency called the US a civilian slayer, prisoner torturer and meddler in others’ affairs, and said the ‘Pax Americana’ was a failure on all fronts.
The official news agency of China, which is seen as the pretender to the world’s superpower crown, then rubbed in more salt, calling American economic pre-eminence just a seeming dominance.
“As US politicians of both political parties are still shuffling back and forth between the White House and the Capitol Hill without striking a viable deal to bring normality to the body politic they brag about, it is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanised world,” the editorial said.
It asks why the self-declared protector of the world is sowing mayhem in the financial markets by failing to resolve political differences over key economic policy.
“… the cyclical stagnation in Washington for a viable bipartisan solution over a federal budget and an approval for raising debt ceiling has again left many nations’ tremendous dollar assets in jeopardy and the international community highly agonised,” the agency said.
It is not the first time Chinese leadership and newspapers have criticised Washington over a policy paralysis that threatens to devalue its dollar assets.
According to US Treasury Department data, China is the biggest foreign owner of US Treasuries at $1.28 trillion as of July. Besides, China also holds close to $3.5 trillion of dollar-denominated assets.
A US debt default and consequent credit downgrade would significantly erode the value of China’s holdings.
As the first step in creating a de-Americanised world, all nations must try to shape an international system that respects the sovereignty of all nations and ensures the US keeps out of the domestic affairs of others, Xinhua said.
“The developing and emerging market economies need to have more say in major international financial institutions including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, so that they could better reflect the transformations of the global economic and political landscape,” the editorial says.
You know what? They’re right. Why can’t we have a government like China’s? They don’t have any messy politicking largely because they don’t allow anyone to join the leadership who might rock the boat too much. Bo Xilai was a corrupt official — but if you look closely at all of them, I doubt whether you’d find any of them without sin. Bo’s crime was not corruption but apostasy. He crossed some very powerful people and will spend the rest of his life in jail for it.
That’s one way to get everyone to go along, I suppose.
We know that Obama and the Democrats would love to put Ted Cruz in jail on trumped-up corruption charges, but fortunately, we’re not China. So Cruz and his Cruzitans remain at large, wreaking havoc because — shocker — they have a different idea of how the government should be run. The American government is what the Chinese government would look like if it was free, relatively open, and was generally run on constitutional principles. Needless to say there are no “free speech zones” in China.
And all you autocrats out there dreaming of the perfect surveillance state, I give you the Communist Chinese and their two million man force of internet hall monitors. The Chinese don’t interfere in the internal affairs of too many countries (do Burma and Tibet count?) because they’re so busy trying to run the lives of a billion of their own citizens.
Yes, the world could do worse than emulate Chinese governance — but not much. Suffice it to say that despite all of our problems, our shortcomings, our silliness, craziness, and occasional looniness, most Americans would prefer the government we’ve got to the kind of government the Chinese wish we had.
Oh yes — and Chinese knock-off jeans are pathetically inferior to genuine Lee’s. So there.
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