The bicycle that is modern China

At the end of Brad DeLong's post "China and Economic Growth: Hoisted from the Archives:"

I consider that there are some today in Washington who look forward to a future in which China is in some sense America's "enemy" and that "national greatness" requires that the United States fight a new Cold War in Asia. There are those who work for Vice President Cheney's office who think that trade with China is a bad idea: it creates a pro-China lobby that will stop any attempts by the United States to slow down China's growth and acquisition of technology. Better, they think, to try to keep China as poor and barefoot as possible for as long as possible.

From my perspective, this is totally insane. In all likelihood, China a century from now will be a full-fledged post-industrial superpower whatever the policies of the United States. The national interest of the United Staets is to maximize the likelihood that that superpower will have a representative government presiding over a prosperous, open, and free society? The China policy of the Clinton administration was to try to do whatever we could to speed China's growth in the expectation that rapid economic growth would have greatly beneficial moral, sociological, and political consequences for the evolution of China. As sociologist Barrington Moore wrote two generations ago, those countries that crossed the bridge from agrarian to industrial civilization most easily and peaceully were those with a rapidly growing, prosperous middle class will be interested in liberty and opportunity. Such a rapidly-growing Chinese middle class would be a much more powerful force for prosperity, opportunity, freedom of thought, and representative government in China than a battalion of lecturing neoconservative think-tankers in Washington D.C. or a host of remotely-guided cruise missiles on U.S. warships based in Pearl Harbor.

Let's all try to keep the bicycle that is modern China moving forward as fast as we can.