Hutch, what you write makes a lot of sense. Which is why it'll probably never come to pass.
Sure, JJ is correct in pointing out how the Chinese authorities rode roughshod over the Hong Kong democracy movement, did everything they could to crush it after giving assurances that human rights would be respected there. So much for that. And I'm with the Hong Kong protesters to be sure; who wouldn't want freedom of choice instead of living under an authoritarian regime?
Who wouldn't? Perhaps the Chinese wouldn't, if they had their druthers. I mean, how presumptuous is it of us, the West, to assume that we know better than they what's good for them, what kind of political system they should live under? It looks, feels, smells and stinks just like the same old Western imperialism practiced by the British throughout their empire, where the most progressive stage of that oppressive era was to proclaim the "white man's burden". Paternalism, chauvinism, racism, all the same shit.
By my lights, the Chinese people, on the whole, seem to prefer an authoritarian system to what we call "democracy", provided of course that it doesn't go too far in locking people up or putting them into forced labor camps. And that has nothing whatever to do with "racism": it's a cultural phenomenon, not a racial one. The Chinese have lived under authoritarianism in one form or another for millenia; who are we to barge in there, proclaiming that we're the liberators of the world, and set them free?
We should just fucking leave them alone. Sure, protest the worst abuses, like those against the Uighurs, vigorously, in the United Nations; even use trade sanctions if necessary. But enough of the saber-rattling already! The world cannot afford that, especially given that the next sabers are likely to be nuclear-tipped ones.
We (and I'm speaking primarily of the Untied Snakes of America here) should not be and are not the world's policemen. It's high time we retreated back to our own borders for the most part, tended to our own knitting, address our own human-rights abuses, before attempting to spread "dumbocracy" across the world.
Of course, as I write this I see how terribly naive it is, how this position will never be taken by Washington, whose head has grown so incredibly large that it will never back down from any fight it picks anywhere in the world. I'm envisioning a world that, theoretically, could exist, but that never will ...
