Chow Mein

I have written about the rising threat from China many times before ... see: China vs. U.S.

Watching cable TV recently I saw a former ambassador to China opine on how this country differs from the USA. His primary point was that Beijing runs things top-down ... whereas we govern bottom-up. He referenced some recent autocratic developments in China to support this premise:

- a Chinese government attempt to profile everyone of its 1.3 billion citizens as to their loyalty to Beijing ... including a plan to insert state operatives into the homes of suspicious residents.

- the opening of reeducation (concentration) camps across its country to deal mostly with Muslim and Christians of questionable loyalty

- its attempt to get Google to develop a special search engine in China ... allowing authorities to monitor and censor how their people interact with the Internet there.

To me, China's autocratic top-down approach to government ... sitting atop the swing to capitalism is a lot more efficient than the clumsy bottom-up democratic approach here in America. However it also has a major flaw -- when they make a mistake it's a whopper ... witness Mao's "Great Leap Forward" started in the late 1950s that killed over tens of millions of its citizens.

The U.S. bottom-up democratic method is inefficient, yes, but it is also self-correcting. Democracy is far less likely to continue with a gigantic legislative boner that destroys far more than it helps. Will Xi Jnping, now Chinese president for life, make some monstrous mistakes with his  unchecked governance decisions? You bet your chow mein!