Chinese Government begins giving direct orders to the USA

The Chinese Government has begun giving orders to the United States of America, directing the US government on how to frame is budgets and social policies in the aftermath of the recent Standard & Poors downgrade of America's credit rating from AAA+ to AA+.

"China," said an editorial by Xinhua, the Communist dictatorship's official newsagency, "has every right now to demand the US to address its structural debt problems and ensure the safety of China's dollar assets."

It further prescribes what the US should do with its money.

The editorial, which China scholars said could only have been published with the consent of the national leadership, Xinhua said the US must cut its "gigantic military expenditure and bloated social welfare costs".

Pressing its advantage in America's moment of vulnerability, China said: "International supervision over the issue of US dollars should be introduced and a new, stable and secured global reserve currency may also be an option to avert a catastrophe caused by any single country."

"What we are seeing here," says Hugh White, a strategic studies expert at the Australian National University, "is a much more strident tone than anything we have seen before".

So far, all of this commentary is published in English. But there is another level of Chinese reaction that has been invisible to English speakers.

"There's a real difference between the Chinese domestic propaganda and the foreign propaganda on this," observes a sinologist from the University of Canterbury, Anne-Marie Brady.

"The tone it's adopting towards the US in English is, 'We're telling off America.' In Chinese, it is much more crowing and gloating."

The heading on the lead article in Xinhua's Mandarin version translates as, "The world will never trust America again," Brady says, "which is fairly heavy stuff.''

In the famous strategic guidance he gave his comrades in the Communist Party, the father of China's modernisation, Deng Xiaoping, said: "Hide your strength, bide your time, and do what you can."

Brady says: "In the last 10 years, particularly since the financial crisis hit in 2008, there's been a shift towards the last part, 'do what you can'," in the behaviour of the Chinese leadership.

"That's code for standing up for China's interests. But this is looking to be beyond that. It's quite harsh."
It's also pretty brave of China to make the boast that US government debt, which, on its new, lower assessment from Standard & Poor's, is rated AA+, is untrustworthy. Because the same agency rates Chinese government debt as A+, which is three rankings lower.

And this leads to the third feature of China's criticism: its potential effect.

"It's probably pretty hard for the Chinese to resist the temptation to gloat," White says, "but from the US point of view, this would confirm US anxieties about China."

"China wants to end up on top," White suggests, "but the secret is to exercise great patience. This tells the US that China is out to get them. Nothing would galvanise the US to get its act together better than the sense that China is out to eat their lunch. Strategically, gloating is unwise."