"around <a href=""https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K78jqx9fx2I&amp;t=2h00m00s"">2:00:00</a> The mistake Jamie makes is to consider the power of the PPC in the same manner as Pinochet's or the North Korean leader's power. The Chinese history after Mao is complex and went on the direction of Machiavel's thoughts", i.e., political power emanates not from God and, in the case of a 1 billion people country, not only from the monopoly of violence but from giving people a good life. "A good life" is hard to define but I think material comfort, health and education are part of a good life - and China is giving this (one could expand on this and criticism, I'm sure, is fitting). Freedom may be knocking on your heads right now - particularly a an aspect of it known as "individual freedom". Let's expand on that:<br><br>Freedom is much greater than individual freedom - using Isiah Berlin's classification of positive (outwards) and negative (inwards) freedom - since individual freedom is only the freedom to oneself. You would be surprised how much negative freedom (individual) exist in China and how weird things are in the US. In China, as long as you behave according to the PCC's guidelines, you can have sex with a pangolin inside your private quarters - so very similar to the US. Freedom to work on political action (public action) is what is heavily restricted in China - however, the Chinese people, will end up finding out that a good life is not only those things I said and will start to want that kind of freedom unless the smart heads of the PCC give them some sort of positive freedoms or think of ways to fix the system before people ask for it. Evidences that China is trying to fix things before people ask for it publicly seem to be happening and the example is the recent attack on corruptions that the PCC did on Chinese corporations.<br><br>Once you educate people, the road to freedom is paved. We must remember, however, that some levels of individual freedom exist only in the US: Citizen's United v FEC would never end up giving the win to Citizen's United nowhwere else in the world but the US.