Across the pond

George W Bush has joined not a few of the world leaders at a sporting event in Beijing. He takes the opportunity to make a fierce attack on China’s human rights record. Which is bad.

But he does it in the week when the world is wondering not about the human rights record of the China of a few years ago.

They have on the news the results of America’s abuse of human rights at Guanatimo Bay. After several years of detention the US has brought their first case, against the man who is guilty of being Osama bin Laden’s chaffeur.

Although the Americans have been using tortures, like water boarding. As if detention itself were not a sufficient incentive to get people to confess in order to get out of their prision.

I am not a fan of China present, or of much of China past. But America has a substantially good human rights record, which has been soiled by George W Bush.

The present threat from China is not violations of human rights, regrettable though they are.

It is the fact that China, in its imitation of American consumer capitalism, is the biggest threat to global warming.

The cheap consumer items which they produce, which are selling so well in Western democracies, are produced by an economy which creating more smog than any other country.

That is what George W Bush should have been saying this week.

But of course he could not take that line. Because his own supporters are also high on the list of those who are moving the planet to global warming. And they don’t want to change their habits.

Because it will affect their profits.

China today is not the China of the Buddhist philiosophers. Or the Marxists like Mao. It is the China who learnt from Richard Nixon that they could become respectable members of the world community if only they started behaving like American consumer capitalists.

Which lesson they have learnt.