In the last 24 hours, the state-run newspapers in China emitted two cold blasts directed at the United States. One relates to President Obama’s trip to India, and the other the U.S. midterm elections
Although much of the attention surrounding President Obama’s trip to India focused on Pakistan’s reaction, the other elephant in the Indo-Asian room has also been watching carefully. Columnist Chen Weihua of the China Daily, in an article headlined Obama’s Weapons Deals with India are Nothing to Be Proud of, hits hard at the $10 billion in deals that are meant to create 50,000 jobs in the United States.
For the China Daily, Chen Weihua writes in part:
With U.S. unemployment staying stubbornly above 9.5 percent for 15 consecutive months, Obama promised that the trip would focus on job creation.
But the approximately 50,000 new U.S. jobs that could be created by the India business deals worth $10 billion are mostly in the defense industry. These are jobs to build weapons that could escalate a regional arms race. They are hardly jobs to be proud of.
Given the lobbying of the U.S. defense industry which employs an estimated 3 million people, it’s perhaps not surprising that the U.S. president serves as a broker for military contractors. America is eager to replace Russia as the biggest arms supplier to India, the world’s largest arms importer last year.
Obama should ask himself why Muslims in Indonesia, where he spent part of his childhood, are staging protests rather that welcoming him. He hasn’t acted to end the Afghanistan War as he promised. Rather, he has made it his own war. It’s now the longest war in U.S. history.
Obama should face up to reality and stop living in denial. He should tell the American people some hard truths. Companies that have secured deals in India are the same ones that have moved tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs overseas.
In the second article from the Chinese from the state-run Global Times, headlined China the Universal Scapegoat in America’s ‘Ugly’ Midterm Polls, U.S. correspondent John Gong writes about how American politicians have wrongly demonized China in order to win votes.
For the Global Times, John Gong writes in part:
Elections are always ugly. And the ugliness of the 2010 midterm election in the U.S. were especially distinguished by its vicious, rampant, and xenophobic campaign of China-bashing.
For the first time in history, from Detroit to Houston and New York to LA, using China as a scapegoat for every U.S. economic problem became a popular bipartisan sport in congressional the mud-wrestling.
China-bashing TV advertisements have showcased gongs, dragons, cheesy music, red communist flags, a flood of invading merchandise and insatiable Chinese consumers. Some of the ads have clearly touched on the sensitive battle line of race, casting a profound shadow over the lives of millions of Chinese Americans.
What’s so alarming is that anti-China feeling in the U.S. appears to be a broad-based and long-lasting trend. If this dangerous trend isn’t dealt with properly, it could be an explosive issue in future Sino-U.S. relations.
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