Stephan:   I see very little comprehension of this in the U.S. Congress or the State Department, and I think the Chinese are winning the conflict on their terms, which is to create a middle-class stable nation preparing for climate change, while we have 139 Republican Congress members who don’t even believe inhuman mediated climate change and an even larger number don’t support democracy. My analysis is that the Chinese see the relationship between the two countries as an economic competition between two models of governance. The Chinese have a long history of civil violence and war, while the U.S. has no living memory of mass civil violence. The Chinese value stability, where the American christofascists seem to seek conflict, as the earth 2 media makes very clear. From 650 CE until 1905 the Chinese were governed by a class of bureaucrats, the Mandarin, and it worked well. They have basically recreated the Mandarin system using the communist party. But China has very little to do with communism as Marx and Lenin conceived it. I see very little comprehension of this in the U.S. Congress or the State Department, and I think the Chinese are winning the conflict on their terms, which is to create a middle-class stable nation preparing for climate change, while we have 139 Republican Congress members who don’t even believe in human-mediated climate change and an even larger number don’t support democracy.