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发帖数: 198 | 1 From WikiChina
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: November 30, 2010
While secrets from WikiLeaks were splashed all over the American newspapers,
I couldn’t help but wonder: What if China had a WikiLeaker and we could
see what its embassy in Washington was reporting about America? I suspect
the cable would read like this:
Washington Embassy, People’s Republic of China, to Ministry of Foreign
Affairs Beijing, TOP SECRET/Subject: America today.
Things are going well here for China. America remains a deeply politically
polarized country, which is certainly helpful for our goal of overtaking the
U.S. as the world’s most powerful economy and nation. But we’re
particularly optimistic because the Americans are polarized over all the
wrong things.
There is a willful self-destructiveness in the air here as if America has
all the time and money in the world for petty politics. They fight over
things like — we are not making this up — how and where an airport
security officer can touch them. They are fighting — we are happy to report
— over the latest nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. It seems as
if the Republicans are so interested in weakening President Obama that they
are going to scuttle a treaty that would have fostered closer U.S.-Russian
cooperation on issues like Iran. And since anything that brings Russia and
America closer could end up isolating us, we are grateful to Senator Jon Kyl
of Arizona for putting our interests ahead of America’s and blocking
Senate ratification of the treaty. The ambassador has invited Senator Kyl
and his wife for dinner at Mr. Kao’s Chinese restaurant to praise him for
his steadfastness in protecting America’s (read: our) interests.
Americans just had what they call an “election.” Best we could tell it
involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other (all from
businesses they are supposed to be regulating) so he could tell bigger lies
on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to
him. This leaves us relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to
fix its structural problems: a ballooning deficit, declining educational
performance, crumbling infrastructure and diminished immigration of new
talent.
The ambassador recently took what the Americans call a fast train — the
Acela — from Washington to New York City. Our bullet train from Beijing to
Tianjin would have made the trip in 90 minutes. His took three hours — and
it was on time! Along the way the ambassador used his cellphone to call his
embassy office, and in one hour he experienced 12 dropped calls — again, we
are not making this up. We have a joke in the embassy: “When someone calls
you from China today it sounds like they are next door. And when someone
calls you from next door in America, it sounds like they are calling from
China!” Those of us who worked in China’s embassy in Zambia often note
that Africa’s cellphone service was better than America’s.
But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don
’t see how far they are falling behind. Which is why we at the embassy find
it funny that Americans are now fighting over how “exceptional” they are.
Once again, we are not making this up. On the front page of The Washington
Post on Monday there was an article noting that Republicans Sarah Palin and
Mike Huckabee are denouncing Obama for denying “American exceptionalism.”
The Americans have replaced working to be exceptional with talking about how
exceptional they still are. They don’t seem to understand that you can’t
declare yourself “exceptional,” only others can bestow that adjective upon
you.
In foreign policy, we see no chance of Obama extricating U.S. forces from
Afghanistan. He knows the Republicans will call him a wimp if he does, so
America will keep hemorrhaging $190 million a day there. Therefore, America
will lack the military means to challenge us anywhere else, particularly on
North Korea, where our lunatic friends continue to yank America’s chain
every six months so that the Americans have to come and beg us to calm
things down. By the time the Americans do get out of Afghanistan, the
Afghans will surely hate them so much that China’s mining companies already
operating there should be able to buy up the rest of Afghanistan’s rare
minerals.
Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their
scientists tell them about man-made climate change. America’s politicians
are mostly lawyers — not engineers or scientists like ours — so they’ll
just say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it. It’s good.
It means they will not support any bill to spur clean energy innovation,
which is central to our next five-year plan. And this ensures that our
efforts to dominate the wind, solar, nuclear and electric car industries
will not be challenged by America.
Finally, record numbers of U.S. high school students are now studying
Chinese, which should guarantee us a steady supply of cheap labor that
speaks our language here, as we use our $2.3 trillion in reserves to quietly
buy up U.S. factories. In sum, things are going well for China in America.
Thank goodness the Americans can’t read our diplomatic cables.
Embassy Washington. |
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