Rubin ... on Robinson on China.

WaPo black columnist Eugene Robinson visited China, got put up in a nice Westernized place, and he's warming to the regime:

This is my first visit to China, and I plan to spend the next few columns reporting what I see and learn. I spent enough years as a foreign correspondent to know how tricky first impressions can be. The subtleties and complexities of any society are — unsurprisingly — subtle and complex.

But not all first impressions are unreliable. Some are such no-brainers that they can only deepen with experience. One thing I already know is that the way many U.S. politicians talk about China is surely wrong.

With the exception of Jon Huntsman, who served as U.S. ambassador here, all the Republican candidates seem to want to be “tough on China.” Mitt Romney apparently has decided to be the toughest, at least on the economic matters most often cited as a reason to display toughness.

“We can’t just sit back and let China run all over us,” he said in one of the debates. “People say, well, you’ll start a trade war. There’s one going on right now, folks.”

Really? From here, it looks more like an embrace than a war. My hotel is in the chic, yuppified Chaoyang District, just up the street from an Apple store, a Starbucks, a Calvin Klein boutique and just about every luxury retailer you could possibly name. An hour’s drive away, at the visitors center for the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, the first restaurant you see is a Subway. High-status automobile brands in China include not just Porsche, Audi and Mercedes, but also Buick.

None of this remedies China’s unfair policy of manipulating exchange rates or its laxity in protecting intellectual property rights. But when you walk the streets of Beijing, you see a huge, rapidly growing consumer society that in many ways looks much like our own. I know this is an oversimplification. I know that boomtowns such as Beijing, Shanghai and others near the coast do not reflect conditions in the less-developed hinterlands.

But I also know that the U.S. and Chinese economies will be the two largest in the world through much of this century — and that they are so codependent that talk of one country running all over the other is nonsensical.
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But this ignores the big picture. Yes, China is governed — in an authoritarian, repressive, at times shockingly brutal manner — by a regime that calls itself communist. But communism self-immolated two decades ago. Walk down any commercial street in Beijing and you see storefronts, venders and hawkers selling anything under the sun. Communism is no longer a system in China. It’s just a brand name that officials haven’t figured out how to ditch.

I’m aware, of course, of the shameful human rights violations that the Chinese government commits every day — and of the government’s selfish, corrupt insistence on maintaining a monopoly of power. These atrocities can never be forgotten.

I think this is what happens when you get a "commercial class" of people, as Robinson clearly is, equating materialistic success elsewhere as being "the same" as the way our American society was built here at home. The elites identify with the elites, and look past the oppression and persecution of minorities. Same as it ever was...

(I identify Robinson as a "black" columnist here, not necessarily because you'd expect more nuanced thinking from a minority class, but how interesting it is that a bit of nouveau wealth, coupled with all the Western goodies your money can, can so simply ignore history or discount the sufferings of others who serve the growing regime.)

Rubin rightly rips him:

I asked Daniel Blumenthal, an Asia expert at the American Enterprise Institute, for his opinion. (He has spoken regularly with Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign about Asia but was speaking here purely for himself.) He was a bit dumbfounded by the column. He said that he would “suggest a visit by Robinson to the many women in China who have been forced to abort their second child thanks to the One Child Policy.” Blumenthal was just getting warmed up: “Or perhaps an orphanage where he can find untold numbers of abandoned baby girls. How about Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo in his jail cell? Or some Tibetan monks who have taken to burning themselves to protest religious repression. If he does have time to leave Beijing he can visit some of the villages where people’s homes have been taken from them without compensation to make way for some pet project of a favored Communist Party crony.”

A former Bush administration official, now at a think-tank specializing in China, was nonplussed, e-mailing me: “The bit about communism ‘self-immolating,’ in addition to not being factual, is in unbelievably bad taste when Tibetan monks actually are self-immolating under very communist, Cultural Revolution-style, Chinese rule in Tibet. Beyond tacky.”

Robinson does, in cursory fashion, recognize “the shameful human rights violations that the Chinese government commits every day — and of the government’s selfish, corrupt insistence on maintaining a monopoly of power.” So maybe China isn’t much like the U.S. after all? A Starbucks doesn’t make you pro-Western or just like America. It says nothing about your political system, to be honest. (It reminds me of the euphoria that greeted each new Soviet dictator. He drinks Scotch — just like us!)
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Actually, China’s rulers very much cling quite cynically to their ideology, which it uses, as all totalitarian ideologues do, to crush dissent, brutalize its people and murder minorities. It’s very appropriate to hope for such a system’s decline, just as Ronald Reagan rooted for the rotting, corrupt Communist Soviet government to fall. But not to worry, Robinson is confident “the burgeoning middle class will find a way to cast off these shackles.” He wants us to cheer that, and we should. But cheering suggests that we do little or nothing about the regime itself. Blumenthal argues, “Yes, we should cheer the reformers on. Maybe Robinson can come home and visit with Obama. He can tell him to meet with just one of these dissidents and reformers. To my knowledge, our president has not yet done so.”

Perry and Mitt Romney, whom Robinson also dismisses as a hothead, see what Robinson does not: oppression, military aggression and economic criminality (especially with regard to theft of intellectual property). Blumenthal reminds us, “China has undertaken the largest military build-up since the end of the Cold War. Yet no nation threatens China. President Obama has responded by cutting our defense forces across the board, and make no mistake, our Pacific forces will be profoundly affected. Robinson should visit Taiwan, Japan, Australia, India, the Philippines. All have been intimidated by the Chinese military. They are the ones calling for a tougher China policy. Australia pushed Obama to place Marines in Darwin. They are frightened, as they should be. China’s military grows and we retreat.” He adds: “Obama is now pounding his chest with his ‘we are back in Asia’ rhetoric, but there is much less firepower to back up our supposed ‘return.’ ”

I hope Robinson’s column was the result of jet lag, and not the first in a series of Tom Friedman-like apologies for the brutal regime. I look forward to his accounts of meetings with monks, Christian minorities, mourning mothers, human rights activists and the rest.

Also, isn't it amazing how often somebody who can write, and is given an expenses-paid trip and national platform, succumbs so easily to thinking they have an immediate "expertise" on the topic matter that others have spent their careers investigating and learning about, so quickly dismissed by the Robinson's of the world, who slip in, assume they know better, and spout off too quickly?

Really, it is a shame what's happened to the independence of the Fourth Estate, a crucial "check" in true democracies. Don't suppose they've had that, or have need of that, in a Communist country like China though.

I sure hope, despite our collective addiction to materialistic things for their own status sake, America doesn't begin to emulate China, swapping government "choices" in formerly private areas like health or family rearing, for the guaranteed rights of individuals to freely choose otherwise, if they can pay their own way for said choices.

Whoops ... wait a minute ... we're already getting there now, no?, as the gambles some took didn't pay off, and we're all now asked to pony up and "be in this for the whole" to ensure our collective survival.

Dumb, dumb, dumb. Learning the wrong lessons, we are.