I know I’m unlikely to change many minds, but it’s always seemed to me that when trying to evaluate one country’s international progress on any one specific ideal, we end up narrowing the debate to such an extent as to make the question irrelevant.

In what seems to be a strong desire to answer questions objectively without respect to questions of ethics or other governmental policies, the intelligent ones among us miss the forest for the trees.

Towards that end – my two cents:

Dear Sir,

It seems maybe we should define leadership to an extent that either includes ethical behavior or can exist without ethics. For as long as the term leadership includes some notion of ethics, “ability to move fast” or the ability to put up light rail for the Olympics, simply can not matter in light of governmental policies designed specifically to limit the freedom of the individual and make the peasant serf work for the state.

Even *if* one wants to make the argument that ethics aren’t integral to the question, it’s still useful in evaluating “leadership”. For instance, when China starts implementing new green policies and initiatives, what’s the likely source of technology they will use? American? German? British? Swedish?

& Why? Because when people are allowed opportunities to flourish through a system that protects them with basic contract rights, innovation will flow much more easily. This is why China might manufacture most of the toys and basic electronic gadgets in the world, but the design process certainly came from someplace else.

An an example, they only recently successfully launched a satellite into orbit.  Prior to 1996, 2 out of 3 attempts ended in massive failures, meanwhile those freer countries had hundreds of them for various purposes including GPS, with even private companies using the technology successfully as well.

& lastly – it’s unlikely China would even admit a problem at all if they still retained the control that was possible just a few short decades ago. Today, they try to control press from earthquakes, the forceful removing of millions to make Olympic Village, their crime rate, and any number of other things they consider “bad” press.

Due to the explosion in the sharing of global information however, China finds it difficult to hide as much as they used to. Even the very closed off North Korea is finding this difficult as well.

So long as they continue to hide bad press, there’s no reason to think this “leadership” is anything other than a play at international recognition while hopefully strengthening their core domestic support.

In strategic thinking, this is known as a two-fer.

Either way – both goals have only one thing in common – staying in power and retaining as much control over the population as possible.

Removing ethics and the results of their standard operating procedure seems the only way to think of China as leading the world in anything.