[evilgenius]

I don't think that simply because Western Capitalists have benefited from a change in Chinese social structure and direction that it can necessarily be said that they were either behind it or in charge of it. It can certainly be said that they encouraged it.

Let's get back to this notion of freewill at work in a society, especially as it pertains to China. Under Mao there was an attempt to do something rather like the 'Small is Beautiful' concept. Turns out it didn't work to put small scale iron manufacturing into little villages all across the country and expect that to do much for China when there was no way to introduce a corresponding matching of resources to markets, especially if gangs of thugs unusually upset the bartering process. Fast forward many years on and it is obvious that the leadership in China realized they had to embrace something bigger in order to bring about that matching. Funny thing is that along with that kind of matching you also get an increased amount of communication between sections of a society that otherwise might not so readily communicate with each other. If you look at a society as being represented by mu (the middle) under the normal curve or perhaps that which lies within one standard deviation from mu, then it is most certainly possible that the character of your average Chinese has changed in response to the increased introduction of capitalism. Whether they have changed in a way that alters things like classic Chinese inscrutability or sense of community is anybody's guess. Things like the Confucian tradition and China's own unique history have made their sense of community pretty resilient over quite a few disruptive periods which it could be said would have definitely imperiled most Western societies.

What is freewill anyway? In this sense are we expecting the Chinese to suddenly act more like Westerners and adopt a self identity that purports to see itself as more external to history and tradition simply because of additional threat to society? Is the change that has taken place in China, which has been wrought by increased intra-communication more than inter-communication, really going to bring that?

I can see a China down the road that would be more willing to engage the world more militarily as regards resource wars, for instance, but not a China that would do so in order to subsume the rest of the world under its own hegemonic empire.