Why Did He Do It?

The logic of necessity, especially economic necessity, is remorseless and often cruel. Well, at least it is if China is the test case. Not so long ago, for example, China was one of the world’s poorer countries under the autocratic rule of a brilliant but capricious revolutionary leader named Mao Tse-tung, whose final years in vindictive near-senility set a world standard for mayhem. He and communist China were easy fodder for right-wing ideologues and right-thinking capitalists trying to show the evil of a particularly virulent brand of fascistic socialism. This was balanced on the Left by the “useful idiots” who saw in Mao’s revolution and rule some sort of paradigm for humankind’s inevitable community-based future.

Now, in the wake of China’s phenomenal economic emergence as the motor of western consumerism and capitalist expansion, things have changed. Now China holds the whole world in its thrall as its greatest single liability—a massive population—has been...