The next time Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Yahoo and the other tech companies are hauled in front of Congress over their actions in China, they should take with them Dr. Thomas Barnett, author of The Pentagon's New Map. From a recent interview with Dr. Barnett:

[T]here’s a tendency to assume that if they don’t look like us in terms of a democracy as rapidly as possible, then they’re not making the journey and they’re not becoming more like us. I talk about this in the book, that there are different routes....

With China, it’s a very different route, okay? They came out of the culture revolution in Mao and everything else, and Deng Xiaoping decided to start with economics first, okay? And he’s slowly letting the Chinese leadership over time the legality to seep into the system, while keeping a strong clamp on the political system, because they fear their country will come apart because of all the different changes being wrought about by rapid industrialization and urbanization, and opening up to the outside world....

And that process is occurring inside of China. It’s not well understood or covered, but the rise, for example, of civil court cases in China is exploding, and it’s a really wonderful and positive development....

[Y]ou’ve got to understand where China is in its history. Democracy advocates, a lot of whom I interact with in China, will tell you that anybody who advocates kind of a rapid transition to democracy and a wide open system inside of China at this point in its historical trajectory, really wants China to fail, because that would just be too much, too fast. A lot of the people I’ve worked with in the democracy movement, and in the government there, will tell you that before Tiananmen, they had an ideal that freedom was about 90% political, and about 10% economic. They like to do statistics like that, percentage breakdowns. After Tiananmen, they came to a far different conclusion. They said we decided that freedom was really about 90% economic, and only about 10% political.

And you can look at that and say well, they’ve got it all backwards. Freedom’s all about politics. But I say look at yourself, look at your own life, look at your daily life, and you tell me that freedom in this country isn’t about 90% economic. I go where I want, I buy what I want, I sell what I want, the job I want, I do. I don’t get told how to live my life in terms of all these economic choices. And yeah, I want a certain level of political freedom on top of that, to say what I want, and to vote as I choose, but the bulk of what we define as freedom in this country is really more economic than political. China is an amazingly free country in terms of economics right now.

What is capped off in their historical process for now is the political freedom, because they’re very nervous about past historical periods where they’ve had that kind of more open political system, and what the result has been. People have to remember that inside China, they’re experiencing a number of revolutions at the same time. It’s the biggest migration in human history from rural to urban. They’re moving from centrally planned to market. They’re moving from being largely cut off form the outside world to having huge foreign influence. They’re going to have 100 million tourists traveling abroad every year by 2020.

These are dramatic shifts. And it’s a requirement for all that dramatic shift, and the fact that they’ve become this huge economic power, and I would argue they are no longer a long term near-peer competitor threat in terms of military, but are going to become, probably, our most important ally in the next 20 to 30 years, then if the price for that is that they’re going to remain a single party state for quite some time, I’ll point out that Japan grew into the world in the same fashion. Mexico did. South Korea did. Singapore still does. These countries all have the trappings of democracy, but if you look at their actual political development, most of them were dominated by single parties until they reached a level of economic stability where it made sense for them to move in the direction of more political openness. But expecting them to do that too quickly is much like us expecting Iraq to fix itself too quickly. We’ve got to have a more long term look at it, and realize that these are natural evolutions that we have to support as much as possible. [Some para breaks added]

To repeat my point of a year ago, Google was right.