I generally enjoy your essays, but this one is pure xenophobic, racist rubbish, for which you should be ashamed. It is not that the Chinese don't have issues--of course they do, as we do and all other states as well. Their genocidal take-over of Tibet was horrific, but so was ours toward our Native American population throughout the 19th and early 20th Century as we "won the west" (in our own jingoistic mythology).

What you don't understand is that the major premises of Chinese culture are dramatically different from those of the West. Here, and ever since the late 18th Century, our basic construct of the self is that it is autonomous, with intrinsic dignity, and that government exists to "secure the rights" of each individual "self." In Chinese culture, the exact opposite is true: the "self" has always been socially defined--one's social role IS oneself. So quite naturally, this appears to us as resembling an ant colony--but this does not mean that individual Chinese are mere automatons, devoid of separate identity. But the way the Chinese conceptualize their identity is inextricably connected to their role in the state, or "mother China" which has been seen, since Confucius, on the model of a family, which is likewise structured hierarchically.