state (much more than just “effectively”). The ideology that China—officially— espouses is worse by at least one Great Leap Forward than anything the CCM concocted. And since 1997 China’s economy has grown by 795 percent. In recent years the political elite of Tanzania claims to have been allowing more free-market liberties. But I suspect, when no one’s looking, that elite is still giving the weeds of freedom a power-hungry whack with its hoe and hitting markets with its corruption hammer. HONG KONG AND SHANGHAI (JUNE-JULY 1997) I was right about how China would treat Hong Kong. But I was right too soon, which is another way of being wrong. For a couple of decades China interfered very little in the Special Administrative Region’s affairs. Then, when Hong Kong began to display the unorderliness upon which freedom is based, the dragon did what dragons do. Especially now that St. George, patron saint of England and presumably of the people England ruled, has retired from slaying dragons and taken up less arduous pursuits such as tying square knots and rubbing sticks together to start campfires. (St. George is also the patron saint of Boy Scouts. And will all you global Boy Scouts please quit helping China cross busy intersections such as those intersections of international spheres of influence known as the Spratly Islands, the Strait of Taiwan, and the Sea of Japan?) I don’t know what Hong Kong’s fate will be. Probably something in the rich and miserable department. Perhaps the people of Hong Kong will come to resemble a sort of King Midas. Everything they touch will turn to gold—and the gold will be the gold fillings and gold crowns of Xi Jinping’s sharp teeth. China is a bad country, and it wants to be worse—the baddest country on earth. China thinks it’s got something better than freedom—the “Chinese way.” And we’re way impressed because of China’s fast economic growth and the huge scale of the Chinese economy. But China’s economic growth was, of course, fast. China is one of the oldest and most sophisticated civilizations on the planet. The Chinese knew how to do everything, but the Communists had given them nothing to do (1980 per capita GDP $313). An increase from nothing to anything at all is an infinite growth in percentage terms. And China’s economy is big because China is big—1.4 billion people. But those people don’t have much. China is poor. As noted earlier, China’s
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