China's rapidly adjusting rule sets
■"China, Others Criticize U.S. Report on Rights: Double Standard at State Dept. Alleged," by Edward Cody, Washington Post, 4 March 2005, p. A14.■"U.S. and China Bridge Divisions To Fight Crime: Cooperation Grows on Drugs, Terrorism and Swindles, Beijing's Newest Problem," by Matt Pottinger, Wall Street Journal, 3 March 2005, p. A11.
■"China's Game College Seeks to Foster Innovation," by Alex Ortolani, Wall Street Journal, 3 March 2005, p. B3.
■"Whose Patent Is It, Anyway?: Foreign Companies Confront China on Rights to Intellectual Property," by Howard French, New York Times, 5 March 2005, p. B1.
The State Department puts out its usual human rights abuse report, naming China, which in turn says that the country responsible for Abu Ghraib (let's not even mention Guantanamo and the turning over of terrorists to states we know will torture them) shouldn't exactly be throwing the first stone.
This is why I argued in Wired that we need to internationalize a rule-set on this Global War on Terrorism. You can't have it both ways. As I said in the piece, it's not about an immediately global rule-set, but one you grow with interesting and incentivized parties. Look at all the new police cooperation between us and China. China comes around on this because it sees the value in it: either suffer the inefficiency or network to improve rule-set enforcement. We will suffer certain inefficiencies in our efforts to spread democracy and rule of law so long as we're easily tarred with similar feathers as those we seek to casually pin on others.
Cooperation on these issues pays off. If we encourage China to be innovative, then it will want to protect such innovation, just like Japan does now after decades of stealing our technology. China is strongly incentivized in the economic realm, far less so in the political realm. So you take what globalization's growing connectivity gives you and press that mutual advantage, because, in the end, that'll get us to where we want to go faster than bitching about human rights. You tame and/or kill authoritarian rule with connectivity, not name calling.