When it comes to global security, why does China continue to get a free pass?
China, as we all know, is a developing country. It's vast hinterland is a place of backwardness and illiteracy. Yet thanks to its embrace of a sort of state-capitalism model, it has pulled up hundreds of millions of its citizens from dollar-a-day poverty. And that (for some reason) is why the world ought to forgive their government's intransigence on human rights and democracy at home and on the international stage.
That's one side of the story, anyway. The other side is that China is a country with a a space program, nuclear weapons and a military that has no regional contenders. It has more billionaires than any country except the USA. China's state-backed companies invest billions of dollars in the developing world, snapping up strategic resources at fire-sale prices without regard to pesky regulations on working conditions or the host regime's record on, say, not committing genocide.
By a thousand metrics -- number of factories, the size of its trade surplus, the scale of its missile arsenal, China is a country on...More >>
