Hu Jintao’s state visit to Washington

My article on Chinese president Hu Jintao’s visit to Washington – soon after a congressional election season in which anti-Chinese sentiment was stoked by candidates for both parties – is online at The Drum.

China-bashing was a bipartisan sport in November’s congressional elections. And the lurid campaign ads – all gongs, sinister professors, callously exported jobs and yellow stars on blood-red backdrops – tapped a rich vein of American imagination. A recent poll found that 47 per cent of Americans believe China already has the world’s ‘strongest’ economy, compared with just twenty per cent who nominated the United States.

Some other write-ups on the summit:

Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times foresees the ‘rise of the Chinese Cheneys’.

Evan Osnos in the New Yorker looks at how the visit is playing in both the Chinese and American media.

And David Pilling in the FT considers Beijing’s foreign policy and concludes that China, unlike the US, ‘is unlikely to be a proselytising power’.

Read more at Reality-based Community