Anyone who visits China and is able to suspend their personal frame of reference may recognize that maybe a country of 1.3 billion, with roots in Bhudism, Confusionism, Animism, and Communism is not suited for western style democracy.  Unfortunately our religious and political dogma has crippled most Americans into assuming that Democracy is best for everyone. They can’t climb out of their ethnocentric caverns to recognize how China’s complex civilization IS working.  Regardless, we’ve lost our right to criticize anyone about civil/human rights, morality, or justice

Remember, Communism was a perverse sort of Westernization.  Consider, Japan is accepted as “democratic” even though the Christian Democrats somehow have won every election for the last 60 years.

As H.L. Mencken once wrote, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Number one - let’s stop patting ourselves on the back for our democracy.  Ours is a form of government which, in its U.S. incarnation, has been responsible for countless bloody foreign interventions since the American Indian genocide, and the transformation of most of the world into a giant farm, mine and factory network for Western capitalists and consumers.  Another salient point: if democracy is taken to mean “rule by the people”, as in political power being shared equally by one and all, then ours isn’t even a democracy - which may be why the Chinese government rep said they will never copy our “political system”.  They were probably too polite to call our system what it is: a plutocracy.

Number two - it’s hard for me to second-guess the Chinese government over its current policies.  If you want to create a society on economic par with the U.S., the inheritor of vast wealth produced over two and a half centuries of stolen European technology, slave labor, immense land grabs from American Indians, Hawaiians and Mexico, and a century of domestic development enriched by foreign wars and undisturbed by wars on its national territory, how do you go about doing it?  If, in order to get the latest capital equipment and technical know-how, you need to attract foreign investment, then it is difficult for me to imagine better policies than the Chinese Communist Party has implemented.  After taking power, they took thirty or so years to implement state-directed industrial and infrastructural development, and to increase educational attainment and average life spans exponentially.  Not to mention eliminate old, growth-retarding socio-economic conditions, like vast private land holdings and sex discrimination.  Then, they start slowly opening up to foreign capital - now you’ve got state-owned enterprises and an educated workforce to sell, plus decent infrastructure.  Doubtless, conditions in China nowadays are often ugly.  As in early capitalist England, in China today the sheep eat the people, as the saying goes.  But capitalism ain’t pretty.  Nor, as a quick glance at North Korea will tell you, is antagonism to capitalist countries like ours.

As was understood since the time of Jesus, having a plank in one’s own eye makes it extremely difficult to remove the speck in our neighbor’s.  (Besides, that speck in China’s eye actually came from the plank in our own - wherefore labor exploitation and environmental degradation than from the demands of “our” investors?  The same people who have always controlled “our” foreign policy and the economic policies that have shifted ever more wealth from the poor to the rich.) Before criticizing China for its foreign and domestic policy, let’s make ours unimpeachable.