【纽约客20121018】猛击熊猫的人

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2012/10/watching-the-debate-in-china-the-panda-sluggers.html

If you want to understand the strangely starring role that China has come to play in this campaign, consider that it came up, by my count, twenty-four times in the debate—more than the mentions of Social Security, middle class, Afghanistan, and Medicare combined.

Each candidate blamed the other for helping China to hoover up American jobs; they outdid each other on promises to get (or stay) tough, with Obama touting his tariffs on low-priced Chinese tires, and Romney reiterating his promise to declare China a currency manipulator. Neither candidate spent much time reminding voters of less convenient facts: China and America are inextricably linked, with nearly five hundred billion dollars a year in trade that drives the global economy; they are intensely involved in fashioning joint responses to global crises from North Korea to Iran to Syria; and they are taking slow but necessary steps to stem tensions over cyberwarfare and military intentions.

To China, the greatest surprise of the campaign has been that its one-time love affair with Mitt Romney has collapsed; Xinhua now seems to delight in calling him “a veteran investor who used to profit handsomely from doing business with China” but has now reimagined himself as the most vehement anti-China presidential candidate in memory. After Romney’s latest pledge to punish China for undervaluing its currency, the state news servicewarned that China “perhaps would be forced to fight back,” triggering a global trade war. Romney does not mention that the last U.S. President to declare China a currency manipulator—a step on the way to trade restrictions—was a Democrat, in 1994. George W. Bush considered the move counterproductive and it hasn’t been tried ever since. (This might be moot: the Romney supporter Maurice Greenberg said last week that Romney is unlikely to follow through on the promise once in office.)

China has been mildly amused by what the state press has called the “China-bashing competition,” but for the second debate the attention reached new heights. “A vanity fair for China-bashers competing to flex their muscles on China,” as Xinhua put it. Still, the Chinese who keep an eye on foreign affairs don’t put much stock in campaign heat. Zhang Xin, a billionaire real-estate mogul who has one of the largest online followings in China,posted during the debate:

Neither candidate is much loved in China these days. When Obama entered office, he was especially popular among young Chinese, though he was a mystery to Chinese foreign-policy analysts, because he defied everything they thought they knew about American politics. (In their calculations, an African-American with little experience could never defeat a rich war hero with extensive political connections, much less the wife of a former President.) Over the past two years, a period when the Administration has tacked toward a more confrontational position, Obama’s favorability in China has declined significantly; a new Pew poll says that the number of Chinese who see their country’s relationship with the U.S. as coöperative has sunk from sixty-eight per cent to thirty-nine per cent.

And yet, over-all, the Chinese seem to prefer, if only slightly, the panda slugger they know to the one they don’t. “If this election was online and open to the whole world—like voting for N.B.A. All-Stars—I could vote for Obama,” one Chinese commentator wrote after the debate. “For China to continue to reform and develop, we need a stable environment. We’re already familiar with Obama’s attitude toward China and his style, which makes it easier to predict.”

One place where Romney’s China lines seemed to get away from him was when he mentioned that there is “even an Apple store in China that’s a counterfeit Apple store, selling counterfeit goods.” He was picking up on a headline, which went viral, about a “fake Apple store” with the same spare design and blue T-shirts, but he muddled the facts. Though China has tons of counterfeit Apple products floating around, that store wasn’t selling them. Though it was “not an authorized reseller of Apple products, it nonetheless sells authentic Apple products—one of the myriad stores around China that sell Apple products either smuggled into the country or obtained through unofficial channels,” the Wall Street Journal reported, noting that a similar store was found in Queens, New York.

Romney has his supporters in China. Yang Rui, the host of an English-language news broadcast, found himself in hot water earlier this year for calling for the government to “clean out foreign trash,” and writing about the “Jewish bosses” of the American media and the “wrong biased policy of shielding Israel.” After the debate, Yang Rui wrote, “Romney has the upper hand on many topics, in my estimation. Obama seemed weak and young. His opponent was mature and calm, with a mouthful of statistics, clear logic, concise language; he is a very good debater!” (His post was later deleted for reasons unclear, but you can find a remnant of it online.)

We can expect more Chinese reaction to come. In the next and final debate, on October 22nd, which will focus on foreign policy, a fifteen-minute segment has been set aside for “the rise of China and tomorrow’s world.”

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