The overriding question that should be on everyone's mind in this new, second decade of the 21st century is: What is going to happen in China?
We generally look to the past in order to help make the most sober judgments possible about the future direction of a country. But China, forging its own model of growth, appears to confound the lessons of the past.
The Communist Party of China was founded in July 1921 explicitly on the model of its Soviet counterpart that had seized power less than four years before. Following the 1949 revolution in China, Mao Zedong fashioned his regime after that of Joseph Stalin, introducing forced collectivization in the countryside, where mass famine was induced and used as a tool of control. Meanwhile, the "leap forward" toward industrialization was based on virtual slave labor.