Bestowing Freedom in China, American Style

OF THE TWIN ANNOUNCEMENTS FROM CHINA, one is definitely progress, and the other is arguable. The Beijing government announced that its national system of concentration camps, which it has always called "educational rehabilitation centers", (or something rose colored), will be discontinued. Thus ends an ancient Chinese custom, which the communists developed to perfection; locking away people who dissent from the government until such time as they no longer dissent. Whatever it takes. The other announcement is a decision to allow families to have more than one child. The official reason given for this change of policy is that it has created an unwieldy bureacracy, and generated social conflict, since its inception in 1980. The real reason is that China is running out of young workers, and stacking up a healthy surplus of old, retired, no longer productive people. If the world birthrate continues to level off and decline, and the human life span continues to increase, the entire world will soon be faced with a planet full of elderly non producers, with no one around to do the physical labor. Japan, Germany, taly, and other countries as well as China are already facing this situation. Although the Chinese government continues to call itself "communist", it in fact is now a mercantilistic capitalistic dictatorship; with all manner of free enterprise permitted, corporate and small, closely governed from Beijing, nee Peking. In America the corporations control the government, in China the government controls the corporatsions, rather like national socialism or fascism. But we Americans certianly know all about concentration camps; first, we built them for the natives, where they remain to this day, and of course, who can ever forget the incarceration of all Japanese Americans during world war two, including the ones loyal to the Unitd States, which they all were, or would have been.