Glenn Beck, China Hand

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

April 1st, 2010

More robot errors in Chinese history: Prepare to be Assimilated

Nothing like a major global event to stimulate the “crap editorial” industry in China, and with the 2010 Expo around the corner (What? Oh, really? You hadn’t heard? Can’t imagine that!) the Shanghai Daily is cranking them out with astonishing energy.

Yesterday’s installment in “How the dung beetle turns crap and calls it writing” was called “Superpower Responsibilities” and after a luke-warm rehash of bad history, we come to this little turd nugget:

After the Roman Empire collapsed because of the massive migration of Germanic people, the spiritual legacies of its civilization were inherited by the succeeding European world. In comparison, even after the Chinese empire was conquered by other ethnic regimes, like the Yuan (1271-1368) and the Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, those ethnic groups were eventually assimilated into the Chinese civilization and subsequently became the driving forces that carried forward that civilization.

The Mongols were actually one of the worst examples of “assimilation,” maintaining very specific ethnic distinctions, most notably a caste system with Mongols on the top, Central Asians second, Northern Chinese third, and Southern Chinese at the very bottom.  When Zhu Yuanzhang and the boys got around to toppling their rule in the 1360s, rather than simply fade

March 25th, 2010

Bad History: Conrad Black Edition

It’s Sunday in the hutong, and at this time of the year that means college football and paper grading.  But I took some time out to have a laugh at this atrociously hysterical piece by publishing magnate Conrad Black on Stephen Harper’s recent visit to Beijing.  The whole thing is pretty funny, but fellow fans of Chinese history will be particularly tickled by this section, in which Black waxes historical:

Educated Chinese never forget that China was the most powerful and advanced empire in the world in the seventh and eighth centuries (Tang Dynasty), the 13th century (under the Mongols), and the fifteenth century (Ming Dynasty), and feel their turn is coming again. At the time of Columbus’s discovery of the New World, China had hundreds of nine-masted “treasure ships,” (whose rudders were longer than Columbus’s flagship, the Nina), which carried huge iron cannons and up to 3,000 tons of cargo. They were 10 times the size of analogous Western vessels, the Queen Mary or Normandie compared to the Noronic.

The Chinese navy contained over 4,000 ships, commanded by Muslim Arab eunuch-admirals, and was vastly greater than Western navies. (Henry V invaded France with four fishing ships, which carried a

December 6th, 2009
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