So Joshua Cooper Ramo is making the rounds in support of his recent book The Age of the Unthinkable and ends up — of all places — on Glenn Beck’s show. I haven’t read the book, but it looks a bit like one of those “stay a week in a cool place talking to interesting people and 1…2…3…okay, PONTIFICATE!” books. No matter. Mr. Ramo does spend a fair amount of time in Beijing and speaks a bit of Mandarin so what the hell…let’s talk about China.
For all his bloviating about living in a Socialist country, Mr. Beck seems to be a bit mystified about that other Quasi-Socialist wannabe superpower…the PRC.
A few choice nuggets:
BECK: First of all, are you now or have you ever been member of Communist Party?
And
BECK: You are over there, you’re meeting with them. You and I had a conversation that talked about China in a different way than I’ve ever heard before. Everybody here thinks: Oh, China, they’ll never get rid of your debt. For a completely different reason, you and I both agree that China is — doesn’t want us to fail because they need us for a different reason. They don’t want instability…
RAMO: That’s right.
BECK: …just like I fear the instability here. If you put riots in the streets in this country — everything changes.
And…
BECK: You say that affects China as well. Why?
RAMO: Absolutely. Well, there are a couple of things. First of all, just in pure economic terms, obviously, China has done an amazing thing. It’s lifted 400 million people out of poverty in the last 30 years, which just by any historic standard…
BECK: I just — I just have to remind you, they did kill 80 million people.
RAMO: Well, actually, in fact, probably over that. If you look at the course of time running from the Opium Wars, which were 170 years ago, even more violent than that.
(Let me digress to kick Ramo a few times as well, maybe he just didn’t feel like making the grammatical switch, but the “THEY” in Beck’s sentence probably should be qualified here a bit, no?)
BECK: Well, didn’t they — when they were getting ready for the Beijing Olympics — didn’t they take people right out of the fields and rice paddies, bring them to Beijing, put them on bamboo scaffolding, and say here, build this building? They did. I can’t imagine going from the rice paddies to seeing telephones, seeing airplanes, seeing giant buildings, the skyscrapers — and then the government said, OK, everybody back.
And…scene.
To be fair, Ramo did his best to hold back the flood of lunatic idiocy washing over him but in the end…it’s Glenn Beck. What are you going to do?
RT @ThePekingDuck: Glenn Beck, China Hand http://bit.ly/cGx0Qs How can we complain abt revision of history elsewhere when US media runs this
Are your comments back on? If so, great post.
Wow. Just… wow. Like you say though, it’s Glenn Beck. I agree that the Opium War comment is pretty bizarre; I don’t think many scholars would consider the late Manchus and the PRC interchangeable.