sshepard,
Thank you for your posts in this thread on the PRC. I find that I believe that most everything you have posted is true. Of course there is a lot of opinion (or analysis) involved, not simple objective facts. But the things you have pointed out are truly what has NOT changed in China that I hope, one day, WILL change. If not the world is in for some heavy conflict within the next 25 years or so. The present Chinese model of self-dealing authoritarianism is not consonant with the best of human nature. I have confidence that human liberty will prevail in the long run.
I have no intention of adding any fuel to this "fire". Fundamentally, the Telegraph brought up nothing that the Chinese "literati" (despite the government's attempts to info-manage) didn't already know.
And people know this, too. But once again, things outside the PRC - Kosovo, Katastroika, Iraq, and the open-ended WoT give pause to their minds, and have to be balanced against massive deficiencies inside PRC - corruption, wastage, ideological (including spiritual) decay, and this "GDP-centric" economic nihilism (for a lack of a better descriptor).
Let's just say that many Chinese (both in China and among the diaspora) have "dreamed" about making China more like the US from decades back.
I remember when I was little, I heard my grandfather paraphrase some (supposed) CCP Honcho: "
if we knew how to make China like the USA tomorrow, we would've done it tonight ... (melting pot, capitalism, and all) ... but we don't."
In the last 10 years or so, some of us were indeed baffled and not used to seeing the US becoming more "like China" rather than vice versa in some tangible and intangible ways.
There is a feeling among some Chinese and diaspora that something during the Reform (particularly the second half) have gone awry ... Some results were superficial but certain roots appear to have been "corrupted".
Very difficult to precisely articulate - but I will say this: increasingly everywhere people are realizing that the choice is less of one between the "good" and "evil", but rather one involving "evil" vs "lesser evil".
I hope you know what I mean, Truthseeker, even though I am not sure I entirely know what I mean myself.