Obama’s China Visit a Setback for American Values, Interests
After denying that he has soft-peddled human rights issues with China, President Obama not only did exactly what he denied doing, he even managed to package his message in yet another cringe-inducing apology:
Obama acknowledged that the United States has struggled with race relations over the course of its history, but he said America would “always speak out” in favor of free expression, worship, political participation and access to information — which he termed “universal rights.”
“They should be available to all people, including ethnic and religious minorities, whether they are in the United States, China or any nation,” he said. [L.A. Times]
The very fact of Obama’s presidency belies the stupidity of this implicit moral equivalence between the United States and China. That is especially so amid an ongoing purge of Tibetan and Uygur dissent and a slow asphyxiation of their centuries-old nationhood. The L.A. Times failed to note that even this exchange was heavily stage-managed, coached, and ultimately, censored. The Washington Post didn’t miss it:
Meeting with a carefully screened group of students at the marquee event of his Asia trip, President Obama on Monday sought to advance what he called America’s “core principles” during his first public appearance in China. But the event itself — billed as an opportunity for Obama to reach beyond Chinese officialdom — illustrated the Chinese government’s tight grip.
The “freedoms of expression and worship, of access to information and political participation, we believe are universal rights,” Obama said at a town hall-style meeting in Shanghai, China’s most modern and outward-looking metropolis. [Washington Post]
But the venue made a mockery of even this token statement:
Virtually every aspect of the event was staged, and it was unclear how many Chinese citizens saw the hour-long exchange, which was not broadcast on national television. One of the most provocative statements Obama made — about the importance of opening up the Internet — was posted on Chinese news sites at first, but then was deleted.
Obama’s audience, selected and coached beforehand by university officials, came from eight different Shanghai universities. A small, random sampling suggested the vast majority were members of the Communist Party. Many of the eight questions put to the president by students echoed Chinese government talking points.
How disappointing. There’s no hint that President Obama breathed a word about the dozens of dissidents the Chinese police rounded up as Obama was arriving, nor was there any apparent mention of China shipping North Korean refugees to Kim Jong Il’s death camps, something that can fairly be described as a crime against humanity. In other words, Obama’s visit not only failed to advance the values that will allow us to avoid conflict with China and create real unity in the two nations’ interests, it was an arguable setback for those values by signaling their insignificance and creating an excuse for China to intensify the repression.
Families of Japanese abductees, meanwhile, say they are pleased that Obama seemed to promise not to restore full diplomatic relations to North Korea until North Korea accounts for what it did to their loved ones. But this essentially endorses the Chris Hill-George Bush removal of North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, something that American diplomats had also promised not to do for many years absent that accounting. Nor should anyone invest too much confidence in President Obama’s promises before having a word with the widow of the Reverend Kim Dong Shik.
Confucious say, “It is not wise for debtor to give advice to lender.”
Your nation, America, is weak and weakening further daily, monthly, yearly, decade-ly. Comments by your leader, whether critical or praising, are increasingly irrelevant. You are bankrupt. Your manufacturing base is gone. Most of your national wealth is now represented by flim-flam finance games companies such as Goldman Sachs play out of NewYork, simply rent-seeking activities that produce nothing. Out of habit your nation speaks with authority, but the rest of the world is seeing the massive economic weakness of your bankruptcy behind you.
America: What your leader had to say 10 years ago was crucial; today it is one factor among many; 10 years from tomorrow it will hold the same relevance and impact as Belgium’s opinion on what China is doing.
Americans will have a long, difficult time comprehending this.
Hugh, America will see this entire planet in flames before it goes quietly into the night. Never underestimate a man backed into a corner with enough fire power to lay waste to the solar system 3 times over.
I’m so glad the world loves us again now that the neocon cowboys have been run out of town and we talk to our enemies.
Hugh said:
The first good thing I’ve seen coming out of Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize just for being US president is that it utterly lays waste to your claim of America as weak and irrelevant.
Hugh also forgot that if America fell then so would follow the world. Not even Belgium would be able to stop it…
Kushibo, Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize because he is weakening America.
KCJ, again you show that in 9 months, you have overdosed on kool-aid of decades past. Thank God Obama was not in office in 2005.
Our sitting president is no angel, nor was his prior positioned. But KCJ where was your outrage then?…
I don’t want to indulge the hi-jacking of Joshua’s post here, but suffice to say I am not a socialist, a marxist, an adherent of black liberation theology, a radical abortionist, a radical environmentalist and I am not the least bit sorry for fighting and winning in Iraq during my two deployments there. This president told Arab Muslims in Cairo that “Iraq was a war of choice.” That is unconscionable, regardless of what one’s opinions are on the war in Iraq.
There is more to serving a POTUS than our policy toward the rotting sewer that is Juche North Korea.
All military and political power stem from economic power.
Consider America and run the statement above to it’s logical conclusion.
A non-American myself, I’m deeply pro-American, however I can look facts in the face and concede they are not pointing the way I would like them to be. America is sinking, and the hole in the ship is economic, not ‘lefty cultural backstabbers”. My comment above is mean as a wake-up slap in the face to right-wing Americans who prefer to hear Rah-Rah cheerleading over cold hard facts.
Here are some cold hard facts for you, Hugh.
Labor unions have bankrupted our industrial base.
Abortionists have destroyed 50 million potential producers in our economy.
Unionized teachers have destroyed our primary education system (only 65% of Americans graduate high school).
Our government has transferred more wealth from producers to non-producers under the welfare state than we spent in all the wars we have ever fought combined.
Liberal policies on immigration have allowed 12 million + illegal aliens in to our economy that pay no taxes, bankrupt social services and send their earnings home to Mexico.
The current administration has already quadrupled the Bush budget deficit and printed 120% more currency in just 9 months. They allowed the Bush tax cuts to expire which will further burden small businesses, the engine of the American economy.
Leftists are destroying the American economy with tax, spend and borrow policies that punish capital risk taking and choke the free enterprise system. America’s wealth was built on the free market principles of capitalism checked by the Judeo-Christian ethic. Take away the Judeo-Christian ethic (a stated aim of leftists) and you get what you are seeing now.
This transparent lie may be a perfect illustration of why we should ignore the counsel of false friends who do not mean us well. This is why I say that being loved is overrated. I should have said that it’s an illusion. Where are you from Hugh? Tell us.
Socialist governments eschew free markets because they suck investors away from the government engineered economies. In order for socialism to work anywhere, it must be the economic system employed everywhere.
Therefore, socialists hate the US for its free-market, capitalist system which historically afforded upward mobility for anyone with an idea, some muscle and some willingness to risk their capital.
The Left’s attack on Judeo-Christian values and religious expression has the practical effect of muffling the collective conscience of the free market – hence, Bernie Madoff and the Apostles of Greed. The reason Capitalism could work so effectively is that Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand and the ‘enlightened self-interest’ described the Framers of our beloved Constitution were regulated not by government but my humanitarian concern. That concern, wholly apart from the godless arm of coercive government has long been animated by our religious convictions, pluralist culture (not multiculturalism), and regard for the poor for the sake of conscience, not statute.
Big Government has claimed to be the patroness of the poor while in reality it’s statist, antireligious, antifamily interloping has marginalized the influence of faith in the US.
Still, our tradition of God-inspired humanitarianism still manifests in our aid to disaster victims, investment in nation building, interventions against tyrants, humanitarian relief organizational activity, missionary work, medical relief, and economic development of impoverished nations.
It was Alexis de Toqueville who wrote, “America is great because America is good.” Should we cease to be good, we shall also cease to be great. That decline is mainfestly underway with the moral decline evidenced by divorce rates, out of wedlock births, massacre of innocents through abortion, inner city crime, disintegration of our southern border, addiction to debt, and infatuation with the new paganism: evolutionism, environmentalism and materialism.
Only a fool would claim that conservatives were faultless in this decline; indeed, their silence is tantamount to complicity. But economic collapse is a consequence of moral failure, not it’s cause.
American Exceptionalism is no myth. That a sitting president would so recklessly disparage his predecessor on the world stage in a race to denounce said American Exceptionalism is shocking. It is a denunciation of American leadership and patronage. Joshua is right – being liked is an emotional stimulation, not a foreign policy. The Politics of personal charisma do not translate into effective foreign policy in a big, bad, dangerous world. Perhaps being feared rather than liked isn’t such a bad thing after all.
Socialist governments eschew free markets because they suck investors away from the government engineered economies. In order for socialism to work anywhere, it must be the economic system employed everywhere.
Therefore, socialists hate the US for its free-market, capitalist system which historically afforded upward mobility for anyone with an idea, some muscle and some willingness to risk their capital.
The Left’s attack on Judeo-Christian values and religious expression has the practical effect of muffling the collective conscience of the free market – hence, Bernie Madoff and the Apostles of Greed. The reason Capitalism could work so effectively is that Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand and the ‘enlightened self-interest’ described by the Framers of our beloved Constitution were regulated not by government but by humanitarian concern. That concern, wholly apart from the godless arm of coercive government has long been animated by our religious convictions, pluralist culture (not multiculturalism), and regard for the poor for the sake of conscience, not statute.
Big Government has claimed to be the patroness of the poor while in reality it’s statist, antireligious, antifamily interloping has marginalized the influence of faith in the US.
Still, our tradition of God-inspired humanitarianism still manifests in our aid to disaster victims, investment in nation building, interventions against tyrants, humanitarian relief organizational activity, missionary work, medical relief, and economic development of impoverished nations.
It was Alexis de Toqueville who wrote, “America is great because America is good.” Should we cease to be good, we shall also cease to be great. That decline is mainfestly underway with the moral decline evidenced by divorce rates, out of wedlock births, massacre of innocents through abortion, inner city crime, disintegration of our southern border, addiction to debt, and infatuation with the new paganism: evolutionism, environmentalism and materialism.
Only a fool would claim that conservatives were faultless in this decline; indeed, their silence is tantamount to complicity. But economic collapse is a consequence of moral failure, not it’s cause.
American Exceptionalism is no myth. That a sitting president would so recklessly disparage his predecessor on the world stage in a race to denounce said American Exceptionalism is shocking. It is a denunciation of American leadership and patronage. Joshua is right – being liked is an emotional stimulation, not a foreign policy. The Politics of personal charisma do not translate into effective foreign policy in a big, bad, dangerous world. Perhaps being feared rather than liked isn’t such a bad thing after all.
As an American who wrongly voted for Obama, I am shocked and disappointed – sort of like being stabbed in the back – listening to his party’s ideals and double-standards in recent years re: Asians and Asian Americans makes me wonder just who the real hypocrites are!
I agree with one ROK demonstrator (a good sign that democracy is growing stronger in the ROK) that Obama has blood on his hands for his silence and inaction regarding the atrocities in NK and the failure to (at the very least) speak out against the forced repatriation of NK refugees.
Speed up the asylum process? – as “a listener” attested to, Obama is no angel – if a true leader of the free world had been in office, a presidential executive order admitting thousands of these people would have been signed by now…