I've bounced some of this stuff off of Chinese friends, and the results have been ... unexpected. The surprising thing was that the overwhelming majority of th

I've bounced some of this stuff off of Chinese friends, and the results have been ... unexpected. The surprising thing was that the overwhelming majority of them thought that China needed an iron fist controlling the country. The folks I bounced this off of included people from Hong Kong, whom I would have expected to be very western-calibrated. I won't pretend to have a grasp of Chinese culture, but what this indicated to me is that there's a value gap between Chinese and western expectations and that our framing for these issues in China may be western naïveté. If what deeply offends our sensibilities does not offend the Chinese, it would also seem to indicate that our forecasts for the direction of progress may be way off.