Ten years after Bill Clinton returned from the far east to say, "China is moving to join the thriving community of free democracies," the ancient empire is surging forward from an economic standpoint, but that seems to be in increasingly starker contrast to their stubbornly repressive social policy.
Last summer, economic reports positioned China as a threat to Germany's status as the world's third largest producer after the US and Japan. Today Germany has its work cut out in quelling doubts about its economic challenger's ability to host the quickly-approaching summer games. The proponents of commercialized Leninism seem bent on the idea that they can reverse Gorbachev's strategy of politics-then-economics for a winning model of modernized communism.
On the other side of the globe, how much of a stake do we hold? 30% of China's exports currently come to the United States. For 1.3 billion Chinese, western perceptions will affect more than the disposition of the Olympics, but as Tibet is well aware, the Olympics may be anything from a harbinger to a flash-point of what is to come. With a quickly diminishing latency, the Sino-American relationship has potential to be one of the central issues driving the candidates' platforms by November.
