The Bizarro worlds of Joe Biden and Xi Jinping

When I was a tiny kid growing up in apartheid South Africa, we had no TV: The censorious apartheid government thought television was the “devil’s own box for disseminating communism and immorality,” and it was only in 1976 that the first state-controlled TV station was launched. There was one channel, and it was as propagandistic as China’s CCTV and, if you can believe it, more boring, at least until the early 1980s.

But we did have American comic books which were sold at corner stores. I got hooked on Batman, Spiderman, and Superman. One of my clearest memories of terror was reading Superman comics about the Bizarro world, a fictional planet where everything was weirdly upside-down.

I was reminded of Bizarro world today, as I looked at pronouncements from Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 about the superiority of the Chinese system (our top story today) and then watched last night’s State of the Union address given by U.S. President Joe Biden last night.

Xi essentially said China’s system was the best. This is what Joe Biden said:

Before I came to office, the story was about how the People’s Republic of China was increasing its power and America was falling in the world.

Not anymore.

I’ve made clear with President Xi that we seek competition, not conflict.

I will make no apologies that we are investing to make America strong. Investing in American innovation, in industries that will define the future, and that China’s government is intent on dominating.

Investing in our alliances and working with our allies to protect our advanced technologies so they’re not used against us.

Modernizing our military to safeguard stability and deter aggression.

Today, we’re in the strongest position in decades to compete with China or anyone else in the world.

I am committed to work with China where it can advance American interests and benefit the world.

But make no mistake: as we made clear last week, if China’s threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did.

And let’s be clear: winning the competition with China should unite all of us. We face serious challenges across the world.

But in the past two years, democracies have become stronger, not weaker.

Autocracies have grown weaker, not stronger.

And then Biden added a sentence that was not on his script (compare the official transcript with the video of Biden’s actual words): “Name me a world leader who’d change places with Xi Jinping. Name me one! Name me one!”

He has a point. But perhaps so does China Foreign Ministry spokesperson Máo Níng 毛宁, who was asked about Biden’s speech today and said:

China does not shy away or flinch from competition. However, we are opposed to defining the entire China-U.S. relations by competition. It is beneath a responsible country to use competition as a pretext to smear other countries and restrain their legitimate right to development, even at the expense of global industrial and supply chains.

On those supply chains: Even if you love getting tough on China, the current political climate in the U.S. around China is going to make solar power more expensive for the entire world.