All of our bets on China have been wrong By MARSHALL AUERBACK Asia Times, DECEMBER 21, 2018 4:06 PM (UTC+8)

…  today’s Cold War 2.0 is typified by what author James Mann calls the West’s “China fantasy,” a notion encapsulated by former US president George W Bush’s remark: “Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.”

But in a broader sense, China has not conformed to the expected Western script. In spite of integrating itself into the global economy under the auspices of the World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Beijing has not internalized liberal rule-based norms implicit in these organizations.

In fact, under President Xi, the Communist Party’s political strength and “purity” have become an end in itself, to which economic reforms have become subordinate (“purity” being a term with strong Leninist connotations).

“China is co-opting institutions such as the UN and the WTO to make them safe for authoritarianism, state-backed capitalism and other threats to a rules-based order.”

As China Cracks Down on Churches, Christians Declare ‘We Will Not Forfeit Our Faith’ NYT, Dec 25, 2018

Looking Back on the Last 40 Years of Reforms in China, Ray Dalio, Jan 3, 2019.

• This is not your father’s communism. It is “socialism with Chinese characteristics” that has been significantly and very effectively reformed, which has made it much more vital, creative, and economically free.
• …on the path to being the most powerful one.  I believe that excellent performance was largely the result of China’s powerful culture and its reforms.
• … Most fundamentally, the US is a country in which individuals, individualism, and individual property rights are perceived to be of paramount importance it is directed from the bottom up
• Chinese leadership seeks to run the country the way they believe a good family should be run, from the top down, maintaining high standards of behavior, putting the collective interest ahead of any individual interest, with each member knowing their place and having filial respect for those in the hierarchy so the system works in an orderly way.
• I’m not saying which system is better. Each culture/system has its pros and cons that I’m not going to get into now.
•  … we would do well to learn from each other, cooperate and compete to bring each other up rather than to tear each other down, and 7) China is a place we need to continue to evolve with and invest in.