ninme

Stephen Harper’s in China and Conrad Black has some interesting advice for him, but first:

National Post – Conrad Black: Between empires

In China, as in other traditionally non-Western countries, such as Russia and Japan (largely westernized as they are), there is a tension between the nativists and the Western emulators. To the minimal extent we can, we should encourage those Chinese that would be more co-operative with the West than not. But the only way to do this is to impress China with the power of the West, a task that is not assisted by the Chinese ownership of over $1-trillion in U.S. Treasury notes, and by the bizarre spectacle of the president of the United States making the international rounds apologizing for the conduct of some of the West’s greatest leaders — including (as he put it in London last April) the remaking of the world by “just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy,” and Truman dropping atomic bombs on two small cities of a country that savagely attacked the United States and its allies without the stuffy heirlooms of a casus belli or declaration of war. Similarly, for President Obama to have declined to see the Dalai Lama, in deference to Chinese sensitivity, was as cowardly and misjudged an act of appeasement as President Ford’s refusal to meet Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1975.

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.

Ouch.