Longtime analyst Gertz explains how America's elites disastrously underestimated China for decades. Now, China is moving quickly with its ambitions to advance its brand of totalitarianism around the world and is working to replace free, open and democratic societies.
The U.S.' approach to China since the Communist regime in Beijing began the period of reform and opening in the 1980s was based on a promise that trade and engagement with America would result in a peaceful, democratic state. Forty years later the hope of producing a benign People's Republic of China utterly failed.