10/30/2010

A fearful view of China

IN DETROIT It's 2030 in Beijing. A professor addresses a class of students. "Why do great nations fail?" he asks. "The Ancient Greeks, the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the United States of America."

"They all make the same mistakes, turning their back on the principles that made them great," he says, speaking in a high-tech lecture hall festooned with portraits of Mao Zedong.

"America tried to spend and tax itself out of a great recession. . . . Of course, we owned most of their debt," he says with a chuckle, then turns more serious. "So now they work for us."

The class erupts in self-satisfied snickers.

Released last week, "The Chinese Professor" is the latest and most inflammatory of a series of China-related advertisements appearing across the United States. Feeding off the nationwide anxiety about high unemployment numbers and deep worries about the country's place in the world, the ad is part of a wave of campaign publicity that casts China as benefiting from the U.S. economic slide.

Read more in the Washington Post

Oct 30, 2010 10:46:59 AM | Current Affairs, History

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