Now, this is different...

Chinese People's Daily editor says Obama can't change anything - and even more confusing stuff

El País is running a Reuters article about Barack Obama in the Chinese People's Daily. Or at least in the Spanish version of it, Diario del Pueblo: China asegura que el ascenso de Obama confirma la división racial en EE UU 16.06.2008.

I haven't been able to located the article in the online versions of the paper, either English or Spanish. I did find an article in the Spanish version about Lindsay Lohan and her new girlfriend: Lindsay Lohan: no necesito más que a Ronson Diario del Pueblo Online 06/13/08.

And I can't find an English version of the Reuters article. So here's my English summary of a Spanish article about a Chinese article in Spanish that was presumably originally written in Chinese.

Basically, People's Daily chief editor Ding Gang, expressing what Reuters describes as a Chinese government position, says that Obama winning the Democratic nomination shows the extent of the racial divisions still existing in America. And they don't think he'll be able to achieve the kinds of changes he's promising.

Lindsay Lohan in the Chinese Diario del Pueblo

The latter is not a terribly original observation about any candidate. But if Reuters is reporting it reasonably - and I think they left out some piece of the argument that might help it make more sense - Ding Gang is pretty much stating the standard official Marxist-Leninist position that capitalism imposes great problems on the US that can't be resolved within the capitalist framework. So I guess the Republicans can't say this is an endorsement by the Chinese Communist Party, huh?

But what am I thinking? Since when did the Republicans need any actual factual basis for making up some charge and spreading it around to the faithful?

It also says, according to Reuters, that Obama "no ha hablado de sacar a las tropas estadounidenses de allí [Iraq]" (has not talked about removing American troops from Iraq). Say what?

What really puzzles me about the article is how it stresses that Obama's candidacy shows how bad race relations in the US are. Reuters quotes Ding Gang, "Obama no ha roto el sentido de superioridad de los blancos en EE UU, sino que más bien ha reforzado esa idea." (Obama has not broken the sense of superiority by the whites in the US, but has rather reinforced this idea.)

Well, I don't know what that means either. So maybe that's just repeating a standard Chinese position about American white racism against people of color. Something of which China has had some direct historical experience. But who knows?

Like I said in the title, that article is different...

Tags: barack obama