America's China fantasy: our political and business leaders insist that opening China to trade will eventually turn it into a democracy. But what if they're just making an authoritarian state much more powerful?

America has been operating with the wrong paradigm for China. Day after day, U.S. officials carry out policies based upon premises about China's future that are at best questionable and at worst downright false.

The mistake lies in the very assumption that political change--and with it, eventually, democracy--is coming to China, that Chinas political system is destined for far-reaching liberalization. Yet the Bush administration hasn't thought much about what it might mean for the United States and the rest of the world to have a repressive one-party state in China three ...

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