>The Chinese would’ve come online, sooner or later. The WTO sped up the process of course, but China’s technological ascendancy was inevitable. I dispute that

>The Chinese would’ve come online, sooner or later. The WTO sped up the process of course, but China’s technological ascendancy was inevitable. I dispute that anything is inevitable - China was an economic and scientific mess in the 80s and 90s, thanks to the Cultural Revolution and Communist anti-truth thought control ideology. The US and our democratic allies had a fleeting opportunity in the 90s to collectively pressure China into making a grand bargain, where in return for permanent access to Western markets, they enact major democratic and human rights reforms - multiple political parties allowed, separation of powers, checks and balances, independent judiciary, military serves the national constitution rather than a specific political party, etc. This is what should have happened, but in Wall St. and corporate America's rush to cash in on cheap labor and a potentially large new market, we replaced that grand bargain with wishful thinking and a rose-tinted predictions of an authoritarian regime that just a few years earlier in 1989 violently crushed a nascent effort at Democracy. This was likely the most costly strategic mistake in US history. We spent 50yrs fighting a cold war to push back authoritarianism, and won, only to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the 90s due to short-term greed. Now we'll have to fight that cold war all over again this century, against a much more formidable adversary that has been able to learn how to meld state authoritarianism with effective economic development and Orwellian technological thought control.