I have this arrangement with the rest of my family whenever an election rolls around: In exchange for researching every candidate and initiative on the ballot, I get six votes. It’s not exactly six votes, we tend to hash things out via email and such, but for the most part, it’s my job to decide what my parents and siblings do in the polling booth.

But this year I’m really undecided. I never thought it would happen to me. I’ve become one of those fickle people interviewed on local news a week before a major election who just shrugs. In other words, I’ve become my family.

Anyway, China came up in the Democratic debate held on Dec. 4 in Iowa. I figure a candidate’s take on China is a good measure of how they’ll will deal with the rest of the world, because

• We haven’t gone to war with China, but suddenly we’ve noticed it has a military
• It’s an easy target politically, but not necessarily the right one
• It’s not (directly) involved in the War on Terror or Iraq

In other words, China is complicated. And so it’s worth hearing how people who want to run the biggest economy and the biggest military propose we approach the biggest country with the fastest growing economy.

Stan Abrams of China Hearsay did the legwork and pulled the China-related quotes from the debate transcript (full pdf here). Check out what they said in three parts:

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III

Also worth reading is the follow up one local paper did on Sen. Chris Dodd’s “slave labor” comment.

Rock the vote!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 11:37 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.