China's View of the Elections

From Reuters via the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) :

China has assailed what it calls the “Bush doctrine” on the eve of the US election, saying the Iraq war has ruined the global anti-terror coalition and has blamed arrogance for problems dogging the United States worldwide.

A searing commentary by a senior policymaker is as close to a position on the US presidential election as China has come.

The article makes no mention of Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, the Democratic Party’s challenger to US President George W Bush in Tuesday’s presidential contest.

“The current US predicament in Iraq serves as another example that when a country’s superiority psychology inflates beyond its real capability, a lot of trouble can be caused,” said Qian Qichen, one of the main architects of China’s foreign policy, in a commentary in the China Daily newspaper.

“But the troubles and disasters the United States has met do not stem from the threats by others, but from its own cocksureness and arrogance.”

Mr Qian says the United States is dreaming if it thinks the 21st century is the American century.

He is a former foreign minister who is credited with breaking China out of diplomatic isolation after the crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

He says the invasion of Iraq “has made the United States even more unpopular in the international community than its war in Vietnam”.

“The Iraq war has also destroyed the hard-won global anti-terror coalition,” he said, adding it had caused a rise in terrorist activity around the globe and widened a rift between the United States and Europe.

Mr Qian predicts the US strategy of pre-emptive strikes will bring insecurity and ultimately the demise of the “American empire”.

Now comes the spin - but to omit it would also be spin, just in the opposite direction. Whatever, here it is:

Analysts say China has a slight preference for the incumbent in the US election, realising that US policy towards China has changed little from administration to administration.

But China, growing in economic and political clout, has expressed its aversion to Bush’s unilateralist tendencies and sided with France and Germany in opposition to the Iraq war.

An article in the state-run Liaowang magazine has avoided endorsing either candidate, noting both Mr Bush and Senator Kerry have avoided criticising China over human rights because the US rights record is so bad.

It says the rift in the United States over the Iraq war is becoming so serious that “no matter who gets into the White House, they will have to face an America that is moving each day toward division”.