Galloway's being a twat again

[Deucalion]

Although you raise some interesting points, I think you're overthinking it in this case.

No-one is threatening North Korea's sovereignty. For a start, North Korea have China who went to war for them in the 1950's and who if they genuinely believed this to be a war of regime change manufactured by America, would not stand for it. Secondly, South Korea is doing very well economically so would not want a war. Any attack by them will be retaliatory. In fact, in the past South Korea has been extremely pacifist, in the face of provocation (shelling of South Korean territory, sinking of a SK naval boat) and have not retaliated so you cannot say they are a warmongering nation.

Of course NK have a right to choose how they be a sovereign nation (how to measure how representative that is in a cultish dictatorship where people are killed or imprisoned for disagreeing with official policy, I don't know).

In terms of China becoming like a Western capitalist country, it has in fact found its own way, combining East and West through a more managed economic path, rather than economic liberalisation we recognise in the UK or US economy. This will bring its own problems in the future with crony capitalism and bad debts hidden on the books, but it is a much more authoritarian and controlled form of economic management.

Ok, I pretty much agree again.

On the subject of China, could it really be a democracy in the Western style anyway? I have read a few articles on China recently on the BBC. The gist of this was it is very misleading to think about China in the same way as a Western country. People are worried that China may become expansionist to go with it's growing economic power. The author of these articles said that this was very unlikely, as China is not a nation state in Western terms but rather a civilisation state. The sheer size of China means that it has spent it's whole history looking inward for threats and this is ingrained into the national consciousness. Therefore China's leaders will want no more than internal stability.

The article also said that there was no real expectation of democracy in China anyway. Instead of China going through a period of enlightenment spanning centuries, as in Europe, it instead has been a predominantly peasant country, which has recently leapt in technological terms. Hard as it may seem to someone from the West, maybe the Chinese do not expect or want democracy? Maybe the same is true in North Korea?

Organising a truly democratic election in China would be a pretty enormous task anyway.