[kennyo]

China is far less powerful than the Soviet Union was, and we now know what a sham that communist country was.

We in America know that it is personal and political liberty that makes a nation great,not the size of it's population.China is one of the earth's oldest civilizations,and yet it stagnates under ideological backwardness.

[AIG]

Democracy is great in theory, but it's been no panacea for today's Third World democracies, which are a lot more mired in general backwardness than China. The success or failure of a democracy seems to be whether it has developed a large, majority middle-class population to begin with who, in any democratic election, will vote for politicians favoring capitalist policies like low taxes over socialist politicians who tend to try to block all capitalist reforms. Third World democracies have mostly poor populations so they naturally elect more socialist Gephardt-type politicians than free traders. S. Korea, Taiwan, etc. all first developed their economies and developed majority middle-class populations under one-party, authoritarian rule over the past 50 years before adopting full-fledged democracy in just the last 5 years. America and France during the American and French Revolutions had majority middle-class populations which rebelled against high taxes, and these countries' revolutions were led by their middle-class or "bourgeoisie" classes.