US News

Chinese Tiger ate US Dove for lunch

WASHINGTON — Who did you think would come out on top if you put a tiger and a dove in the same room together to work out their differences?

Yes, those were white bird feathers sticking out of the tiger’s mouth at the lavish state dinner hosted by President Obama at the White House this week.

President Hu Jintao is a Tiger Leader. That’s kind of like a Tiger Mother, only less nurturing and more demanding.

President Obama is a Dove Leader. He speaks endlessly and carries no stick. And he likes to do a lot of bowing and scraping. Kind of like the way Hu Jintao likes to do a lot of not smiling.

If you see all that together in one room, bet on the Tiger.

But even a Dove like Obama will manage to emerge with something. In this case, he escaped with his vocal chords unscathed.

And he is still talking.

He is talking all about what a great deal he got us while doing his little humble shtick.

He is crowing about $45 billion in US exports he got China to agree to. That doesn’t exactly close the more than $250 billion in trade deficits we rack up against the communist state each year.

Nearly half of the total value of those trade deals — $19 billion — is for aircraft from Boeing that China had already agreed to purchase as part of a larger deal going back to 2007. That was more than a year before the Dove Leader had even landed in our midst.

And Obama said he really busted Hu’s chops over his country’s unfettered piracy of everything from designer handbags to software to drugs to sophisticated electronic gadgetry that American companies have plowed billions upon billion of dollars of research and development into — only to have rogue companies in places like China rip them off and flood the market with cheap goods.

For years, of course, China has denied many of the accusations of intellectual-property theft while at the same time claiming to crack down on the stealing.

Then came Hu’s big concession to Obama — perfectly illustrating his country’s regard for intellectual property. Hu promised he would try to get his own government agencies to quit using pirated software.

His OWN GOVERNMENT AGENCIES???

You call this a concession?

No, that is called complete bamboozlement.

The other hot topic of negotiation was currency manipulation, and, apparently, Hu was not up for any lectures from the leader of a country so perilously drowning in debt and unable to quit recklessly spending money it does not have.

No specific “deals” were offered in that department.

And Obama is talking about how he really wagged his finger in Hu’s face over China’s human-rights record.

To be certain, Hu surprised many — and surely caused the Dove Leader’s heart to flutter — by admitting that his country could do more in the area of human rights. But those are nothing more than words, and they did not spring a single freedom-loving dissident from a Chinese prison.

It was, at least, a baby step in the right direction.

Quick! Someone alert the Nobel Prize Committee that it needs to award President Hu Jintao of China the Peace Prize for all the great acts of respect for human freedom that he has as yet not quite fulfilled but surely will!

Or, perhaps, such awards are handed out on credit only to Dove Leaders, never Tigers.

churt@nypost.com