I really mean as our political elites do not speak with Chinese political elites except to point fingers or to yell at them or to do other things and saying if you would sit down to speak with each other, we'd actually get somewhere.
So let me be specific. China looks today not completely different from the Han dynasty,
a centralized administrative state, and with Confucian culture, with a tradition of
excellence of the mandarins. When I speak with Chinese senior officials, which I do often,
they are the best informed professionals I know in the world. When I deal with them,
they know they're brief, they're sophisticated, well-trained, occasionally my students,
and that political culture is more than 2,000 years old. When I look at my own country,
the United States, it is a semi-democratic, white-dominated, hierarchical, racist society.
But amazingly, it still looks that way, although we're much more diverse now than we were.
So let me ask you this, Jeff, because this is…
I want to point out that these are deep cultural distinctions, but we shouldn't just simplify,
because we say democracy. And one more point I want to make about democracy, because we're
in a democracy forum where we treat democracy as the good. The most violent country in the world
in the 19th century, by far, was perhaps the most democratic, or second most democratic,
and that was Britain. You can be democratic at home and ruthlessly imperial abroad. The most
violent country in the world since 1950 has been the United States. Jeffery, stop now. Jeffery,
I'm your moderator, and it's enough. Okay, I'm done.