btt
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I do not accept many of your contentions about China. China's appearance as a country that is integrating with what you call the core is much more appearance than substance. Western corporations trying to particpate with China and in China continue to find this out every day. Unbeknownst to most Westerners alot of "capitalist" activity in China is "capitalist" in name only. The majority of "private" large size companies based in mainland China are predominately private only in appearance. Get underneath to the principal investors and most often there is some major office of the government or the communist party behind it, and controlling its public listed board of directors. The Chinese communist party opened up membership to the business community not to modernize the party but to co-opt the expanding business class; and keep them apolitical. Internally China is developing into something that I refer to as "state-capitalism" and in its extreme nationalism, xenophobia, blind ambition and ruthless government appartus it most closely resembles a modern Asian version of Fascist Germany. Internationally, China is weening Southeast Asia into its own security association, spending billions in very successful moves that are buying friends and long term agreements with countries on every continent. Militarily it is using its foreign exchange earnings (from US consumers) to build a military machine that will match US Asian military resources plane for plane, ship for ship, missile for missile in less than ten years. The west sees what it wants to see about China and your "core". Yet, anything that is permitted in China today is simply that, "permitted". There is no legal or political foundation for anything we think of as "capitalism" or "freedom" or legal, financial, social rights and obligations. The Chinese people know that whatever they can do now they can do because it is permitted; not because they have any "right" to it. The party will maintain that self-assurance as long as they can. No matter what the presure for change becomes, whether social, economic or otherwise, the party is planning on permanent monopoly status and will not ever go quietly or easily. In my opinion, all our efforts to try to trick China into securing long term peace with it by inclusion in "the core", is seen by the Chinese communists and just playing into their own long-term plans to become our worst trojan horse inside that core. Call me a pessimist. I would prefer history will do the same instead of the realist that I think I am.