Posted by Matt Dempsey Matt_Dempsey@epw.senate.gov

EPW POLICY BEAT: FRIEDMAN’S FOLLY

“I have been over into the future, and it works.” - Lincoln Steffens, after returning from the Soviet Union, 1921

In a column more puerile than profound, Thomas Friedman wonders, “What if China had a Wikileaker?”  His point is that if another Julian Assange leaked China’s diplomatic cables, we would see China laughing at America.  In Friedman’s reverie, Chinese diplomats scoff at surly travelers complaining about full-body scans; chuckle over elections in which one candidate tries “to raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be regulating)”; and laugh at provincial Americans who “travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they are falling behind.”

In Friedman’s fictional cable, the Chinese would really be floored about Republicans’ backwardness on climate change:

Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their scientists tell them about man-made climate change. America’s politicians are mostly lawyers — not engineers or scientists like ours — so they’ll just say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it.

As the modern day Lincoln Steffens, Friedman is convinced that China’s communist system is the future, and it works.  As he wrote in 2009: “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.”  Drawbacks?  Courtesy of Amnesty International, here are those “drawbacks,” straight from China’s “reasonably enlightened group of people”:

 - “An estimated 500,000 people are currently enduring punitive detention without charge or trial, and millions are unable to access the legal system to seek redress for their grievances.” 

 - “Harassment, surveillance, house arrest, and imprisonment of human rights defenders are on the rise, and censorship of the Internet and other media has grown.” 

 - “Repression of minority groups, including Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians, and of Falun Gong practitioners and Christians who practice their religion outside state-sanctioned churches continues.”

 - “Women and girls continued to suffer violence and discrimination.”

 - “China remains the leading executioner in the world.”

And so on.  As with Americans once enthralled by Stalin’s Soviet Union, Friedman sees windmills and solar panels more than China’s brutally repressive regime. 

But apparently repression is the price to pay for realizing China’s green revolution, by which Friedman means: China is rapidly deploying wind, solar, and other green technologies - putting America at a strategic and economic disadvantage.  The future is here, and it’s in China. 

Or is it?  According to the World Resources Institute, here is China’s energy future:

That’s right, in China, coal “will remain the dominant power source” (Asian Development Bank); the “government’s energy policies are dominated by the country’s growing demand for oil” (Energy Information Administration); and wind and solar are “a sideshow” (Columnist Robert Samuelson). 

Dan Henninger, an exceedingly more clear-eyed and sensible columnist for the Wall Street Journal, incisively and concisely summed up Friedman’s moral blindness. “The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman asked yesterday: ‘What if China had a Wikileaker?’ The three-word answer: They’d execute him.”    

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