What About June 5th?

Derek Scissors / June 05, 2009

On the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, everyone is talking about human rights in China. The question is, why isn’t there more talk at other times? The answer is the same for human rights as it is for many other issues involving China: because we overemphasize economic matters unnecessarily.

The PRC’s economic rise is of course important, even breath-taking. But we have gotten ahead of ourselves. It is the American economy which drives the world, with Beijing crafting a development model in light of that dominance. And, as with Japan, China may never reach economic parity with the U.S. (more…)