It is in our Western interest that China should be open, stable and prosperous, and a full partner in the international community. That is the only rational policy for the West to pursue with a country which has the world’s largest population … nuclear weapons and is an enormous market. The opposite policy … containment would be a self-fulfilling prophecy, turning China into an enemy when we want a friend.
—Margaret Thatcher. Speech to the International Herald Tribune Conference, Beijing, China, November 14, 1996.
The Chinese are not entitled to steal the intellectual property of the West. They are, however, entitled to the fruits of their own labor and to freely trade with the rest of the world.
The only way to meet the Chinese threat is for the West to reform itself. Socialism, money-tampering and welfare in the West must be renounced in favor of liberty. The United States must return its economy to the double-digit growth it enjoyed in the nineteenth century through small government and low taxes. If it does this in time, then China, from its much smaller base, will be unable to grow fast enough to pose a threat to the United States for at least one hundred years. China’s growth, instead of portending disaster, will then, through trade, simply enhance the increased prosperity of the Free World.
