[D9 (RIP)]

All the points I would make in this discussion have been well covered by TR, but just to tease out one point he hit on a little further.

A few weeks ago, shortly after the announcement of the aborted Unocal deal, the Wall Street Journal featured a profile of the Chinese quasi-company involved. The great irony was that the management of this company has a very profit-oriented, capitalisitic business model. It's internal policies were meritocractic, with efficiency and profitability as the number one goals and competition encouraged within the ranks. This, IMHO, is a microcosm of a bigger, internal problem that seriously threatens China as it emerges into economic prominence. Namely, that while the handful of nominally-communistic militant thugs that run that country want to become the pre-eminent bully in the region, to get there they have to tolerate and even foster the kind of ideas in their citizenry that are the greatest threat to their government cum racket.

In every dictatorship in recent history - Nazi Germany, Sov Union, China, Cambodia, Taliban Afghanistan, et al - the foremost concern of these tyrants (be they individual or by committee) is the supression of ideas that are incompatible with the culture of fear that give plausibility to their repressive undertakings. The fortunate irony for these power-lusting dictatorships, is that the same ideas that so threaten them are the very ones that are necessary for them to become powerful. And so I expect it to be in China, that they have a choice to make: 1) maintain their solid hold on their population, crushing dissent - they will have to maintain this if they intend to steer China towards a conflagration with the United States, or 2) pursue a path of economic success and material happiness, and accept with it the culture that will make using all that wealth for militaristic adventures dangerous on the homefront.

China is right now telling its people that a new era has dawned, when their own happiness and prosperity can become the new cultural standard (if this article can be believed, or anything can be generalized from it). Once you let people get used to the idea that they are making for themselves, you make it much harder on yourself in the future to enlist all their hard earned wealth in destructive power grabs.

Either way, it's a dangerous and unpredictable future with China. They are building a Navy, for instance, that many experts believe is intended to challenge us for control of the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans. Just pointing out that their path is frought with its own obstacles.