Among the remarkable sights that has accompanied the debt-ceiling melodrama is the full spectrum of the Chinese press—usually divided—converging in an orgy of tittering and bewilderment. “The Tragic Fall of the House of Greenback,” was how the right-wing Global Times put it today in its English edition. “Washington’s Immoral Political Farce Should Cease,” suggested the People’s Daily.
That might sound like the usual tinny hectoring you’d hear from Communist Party papers under Castro or Kim Jong Il, but China, after all, long ago adopted the principles of Western economics (all but in name). So it is striking to read China’s Economic Observer—a reliably sober publication that often finds much to admire in the West—adopt the posture today of a man encountering an old friend gone completely bonkers. “Under the current political system, the U.S. government is suffering from schizophrenia. The growth in partisan politics has only made the disease worse.”
Little surprise, perhaps, that one of the trending topics today at on the Web forum of the People’s Daily is a conversation titled “China may be the biggest winner in America’s debt crisis.”
Chinese leaders have a laundry list of things to worry about at home, but, for the moment, they are enjoying the maxim that the power of any nation is an inherently relative asset. It’s not every day that I find something in the People’s Daily that resonates. But it’s hard to argue, as it put it today, that the past week has created “more doubts about America’s political direction, its foreign policy, and even its ‘leadership.’ ”
