#1 U.S. foreign policy and the conventional wisdom of the elite class was that if the West engaged with the CCP, it would become more liberal and less repressive of its own people, and it was this thinking that allowed the CCP to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the end of 2001.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall it should have been apparent that the best way to deal with China was the same way we dealt the the Soviet Union. But it seems a number of senators and corporate leaders were smelling money. |