Michelle Obama Snubs Chinese

So the Chinese and various American pundits are upset at Michelle Obama for not making herself available to Chinese First Lady Peng Liyuan during her husband President Xi Jinping’s meetings with President Obama this past week. 

With dreary predictability, they criticized the so-called snub and reminded us – as they never tire of doing – that American actions will cause them to lose face.  This accusation is normally enough to cause America’s Sinophiles to go into a knee-jerk tizzy, and this instance was no different, with various of them clucking their tongues at her no-show.

Ironically, the “pro-Beijing Hong Kong newspaper Ta Kung Pao” exposed the phoniness of the claims of hurt feelings when they referred to Mrs. Obama’s decision to tend to her children during the last week of school as a “family trifle”.  Yet another Chinese commentator was quoted as writing "The decadent American imperialists don’t give us 'face.' Who is more important, children or creditors?”  The gross chauvinism of such remarks reveals all too plainly that the Chinese expect Americans to “kow-tow” to them, and substitute Chinese values for our own.  They also aren’t very good at practicing what they preach, since for decades now, Chinese descriptions of the motives of Americans start out with insults, and then just get worse.   Given their relentless consistency in such matters, it is not a stretch to say that they don’t believe Michelle Obama deserves the same respect when it comes to face-saving as Peng Liyuan, or for that matter the Chinese government. 
 

If we take the Chinese accusations at face value, though, I’d like to propose an alternative explanation to Mrs. Obama’s decision: perhaps she snubbed Peng Liyuan because she is a Major General in the army of  a brutal dictatorship that enslaves millions, murders dissenters at will, kidnaps Americans, steals hundreds of billions of our intellectual property every year, sabotages the geo-political agenda of Western democracies at every turn, manipulates their currency to destroy our manufacturing base and pollutes the planet without a twinge of conscience.  And let us not forget that they aid and abet the nuclear terrorism of North Korea. Could be she feels that such people are not deserving of her undivided attention.
 

Hey, it’s something to think about.

Pete Smith

Cypress

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