A week or so back I was talking to a friend in Paris, a brilliant and very wordly guy with a very realpolitik view of the world. I said I thought that we had a duty towards the people of China to wish for the best for them in their reopening, almost to pray for them, though I didn't use those words. His view was that the social contract that the Chinese have tacitly accepted is a high degree of central control and a ceding of individual rights in exchange for economic growth.
While there's some truth to what he's saying, when I see pictures of Chinese family members reunited with their kids after China reopened, I can't really accept it. We have to wish and to some extent advocate for the best for them, which in our minds has to involve greater measures of freedom and bottom up governance than what they currently enjoy. This is not the same as saying that we have the right to impose our vision of the details of that and what are appropriate tradeoffs between individual and collective interests. But right now the pendulum has been swinging in the wrong direction, just as under Deng and his successors it largely swung in the right direction, however clumsily and imprecisely.
Similarly in Iran, we can't wade in and depose the regime. We saw what happened when we did that back in 1953, but we should cheer for the people and especially the women of Iran as they push for liberalization.
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