George,
The Serbs should not be collectively demonized, and NATO's action was a disaster engineered by inept politicians, whom I am quite comfortable with you calling "selfish younger cronies".
But let's set the record straight on China's leaders : they make Clinton and Albright look like saints.
Their main interest in this affair was not what happened to the Serbs, but rather, to use NATO's ill conceived plans and the bombing of their embassy as a means to discredit pro-democracy activists, divert attention from Tiananmen's 10 th anniversary, and generate a Patriotic fervor that corrupt politicians are often keen to exploit for their own selfish interests.
Surrendering the moral high ground to Chinese Communists and Russian hardliners, if only temporarily, was, IMO, one the greatest negative consequences of this fiasco.
Unlike you, I am not willing to prize China's opposition to NATO during this crisis so much as to close my eyes on all their own abuses, for the sake of keeping people like Yiwu happy.
As NATO is about to find out with the KLA, the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend, and in the case of China, those Communists are far from being respectable.
On a final note, defending or justifying the survival of Communism in China by pointing to what happened to reforms in Russia is ill advised.
Communism is not a guarantee of stability in China, on the contrary.
Communism breeds corruption, and corruption is the source of instability.
If the Chinese want stability, they will have to progressively abandon Communism and erradicate corruption. |
