Pat Buchanan: how the Chinese must see us

Patrick J. Buchanan, How the Chinese Must See Us

As Hu Jintao wings his way home, America’s hectoring still ringing in his ears, he must be thinking that maybe we Americans should stop lecturing them and take a closer look at ourselves....

Why should any nation emulate the U.S. trade policy of the Bush-Clinton-Bush era that has stripped us of a third of our manufacturing jobs and made us dependent on China and the world for the needs of our national life and the borrowed money to pay for them?

Why would China, seeking to make herself an independent and self-sufficient nation, adopt a policy that cost us our independence?

And what are the Chinese doing in their ascendancy to first power on earth that we did not do in ours?...

But as America sinks economically and retreats strategically, while China grows at 10 percent and bristles with confidence, we appear to be a nation of whiners. They are eating our lunch, and we sound like losers in a locker room.

We demand that the Chinese be more open and tolerant of opposition and dissent. But when they look at the gridlock of American democracy, the pettiness of our politics and the failure of our policies, while they are on the move at home and all over the world, why should they want to be more like us?

Has our American capitalism in this century performed as well as their autocratic capitalism? Is our political performance an argument for the superiority of our ballyhooed democracy over their one-party state?

We can’t win or end our wars, balance our budgets or control our borders. Great states like California and Illinois appear about to go belly-up. The U.S. government is running a third straight deficit of near 10 percent of our entire economy. We used our stimulus money to save government jobs. They used theirs for bullet trains.

Time to see ourselves as others see us.

File under: they are eating our lunch.