Thus they withdrew into their bunker and have remained for the last 200 years prickly, ultra-sensitive, quick to take offense and too ready to assume the worst of the West's motives. Reasoning of this kind, assuming China will soon mature into a superstate, seems to blight good sense. Were that to happen it would make the world a more dangerous and less prosperous place. A modicum of a redeeming feature is Patten's appraisal of lessons learnt and how to deal with China in the future. The decision earlier this year by both Europe and the U.S. not to censure China at the UN Human Rights Commission marked the low point for contemporary western policy.
Engagement is one thing.
Blindness, timidity and forsaking the root-essentials of what western society has achieved after its own painful evolution is another. China is at the end of an era. Marxism and Maoism are dead. Sometimes, as Patten concludes, one has to pinch oneself to remember who needs who most. It is quite pathetic, it is laughable, but above all distasteful that western countries regularly betray each other, and in so doing the human rights activists inside China, in an effort to better position themselves in this quite modest market place.