NY Times‘ Tom Friedman Tells Chris Cuomo China is Doing Better than America, Despite ‘Bad Stuff With the Uighurs’
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman on Monday lamented the United States’ failure to be more like China, citing what he described as the country’s high-speed trains and political sophistication.
“You know what I’ve been thinking about … I was thinking, like, what are they doing in China today?” Friedman said in an evening interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo. “You know, Chris, do you know that it takes 4 hours and 18 minutes to take the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai? And it takes 21 hours to take the train from New York to Chicago. And they’re both about the same distance.”
Friedman admitted that China’s “reeducation” camps for Uighurs — lauded in January by China’s U.S. embassy for making women “more than ‘baby-making machines” — were not perfect, but said the country generally has a better political dialogue than America.
“I’ll tell you something they weren’t thinking about in China this week,” Friedman opined. “They weren’t thinking about some knucklehead. They weren’t spending the week thinking about a knucklehead who claimed 9/11 didn’t happen. They weren’t thinking about some guy who is a QAnon shaman. They were probably thinking about some bad stuff with the Uighurs and all of that, oh, for sure, but I guarantee you they weren’t wasting their time on this nonsense. And how do we do this week after week, month after month, and think we are a serious country? We are so deeply unserious as a country right now. And we need to put this crap behind us. OK?”
Friedman didn’t mention the Chinese Communist Regime’s role in managing the country’s political dialogue, or whether he believed it would be helpful for the U.S. to take similar measures. The regime permits eight minor political parties to exist, but requires them to consent to the Communist Party’s leadership as a condition of their existence.
He added that he viewed President Joe Biden as “a serious guy” who was “cursed” Republicans.
“I can add nothing,” Cuomo replied. “That sums it up in all its sadness and its different dimensions.”
Watch above via CNN.
