During GDC,
GFW Radio had an interview with American McGee, who now (ironically) lives in China. (Feburary 22nd.) There were some very interesting insights into the Chinese mind there, and I think it's important to understand the cultural divide about how this works.
Apparently the Chinese don't have such a thing as "politeness". They don't stand in line; they stand in a big human funnel, like so many cattle. If you politely wait your turn, you'll never get it; you need to be as pushy as everybody else. That's how it works.
So I suspect this is representative of China's foreign policy. They push people around, with the expectation that somebody will push back, but everybody else is in this different mindset where there's an assumption that it was inappropriate for anybody to do any pushing, so nobody ever pushes back and China tentatively starts pushing harder, expecting somebody to start. The irony, of course, is that because they've been pushing people around, they've got a lot of countries by the balls; the United States is going to dot its "i"s and cross its "t"s, because (as I understand it) China could call us up, say "We want our money back, please" and single-handedly cripple our economy. Would they do that? Hard to say. I'm hardly an expert on Chinese psychology. But Washington sure as hell doesn't want to find out.
The Chinese government's as reluctant to accept such basic Enlightenment ideals as freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly as it is to give up land. It's trying to reap the technological advances of the twenty-first century without catching up to the European political advances of the eighteenth. I realize that these are not changes that will occur overnight and must be chipped away at, but our government seems to be showing very little interest in even modest progress. (That could be because Bush's economic strategy consists of "owe a bunch of money to China so that the richest 1% of America doesn't have to pay taxes".) China needs to be challenged. More pressure needs to be brought to bear..
Hate to say it, Thad, but I think there's some ethnocentrism here. The population of China isn't chomping at the bit to say what they want about the government; a police state is second nature to people who have concrete funnels instead of single-file lines. The Enlightenment is a phase of Western history; complaining about how China doesn't hold to 18th century European philosophy is in the same category as bringing Christianity to cultures with ancestral and shamanistic religions. Their old system is working just fine for them; they don't need our newfangled freedom of the press, because they don't want to fix what they feel isn't broken.
EDIT: To clarify, I don't mean to imply that we should just shut up and keep our noses out of China's business, but I do mean that we should leave them alone with regards to areas in which they don't be steppin'. (Actually, a great deal of my foreign policy philosophy involves the phrase "Don't be steppin'.") Freedom? I have no reason to believe that the population of China is seriously dissatisfied or troubled by the government restriction of freedoms we think are fundamental; they ain't steppin'. Tibet? From what I understand, they be steppin', and that ain't right.