Victor Mallet of the Financial Times seizes on Rumsfeld’s recent comments on June 4, in which he said that China needs to open up its political system. Victor argues that economic growth and western influence — one in the same in China’s case — will bring with it inevitable internal democratic reform, even as the government resists it.

He applauded the global spread of democracy, expressed satisfaction that dictatorships were losing power, and suggested that China needed ???????a growth in political freedom??????? and ???????a more open and representative government???????.

The Chinese response was revealing.

Cui Tiankai, the senior foreign ministry official present, challenged Rumsfeld on military strategy, asking whether he really believed China faced no threats from abroad and whether the US felt threatened by China. On the taboo subject of Chinese political reform, Cui said nothing.

Chinese reform, however, will stay on the world????????s agenda, if only because it is the most important unresolved political issue of the 21st century.

The exchange between Rumsfeld and Cui took place on June 4, when thousands demonstrate peacefully in Hong Kong each year in memory of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy campaigners who were mown down by troops in 1989. On the same Saturday, a Chinese diplomat addressed a rally in Australia after defecting from his government.

In their efforts to stifle debate at home, the Chinese authorities have recently cancelled academic conferences on politics and detained prominent journalists, including a Hong Kong-based correspondent for Singapore????????s Straits Times, on flimsy accusations of spying.

Given US support for totalitarian allies such as Uzbekistan, Rumsfeld????????s call for freedom in Asia may be dismissed as hypocrisy. Yet, on Chinese politics, he is simply stating the obvious: the rapid growth of the Chinese economy must be, and will be, accompanied by political reform. The democratising pressures that have followed every industrial revolution from the UK to South Korea are now visible in China as its people become more prosperous and educated. The key question is one of timing.

The focus now is on communist China and democratic India. Democrats say India has already solved the problem of how to achieve legitimate and peaceful changes of government, whereas for China that vast challenge lies in the future.

Authoritarians retort that the Chinese are twice as rich on a per capita basis as the Indians and argue that a rapid imposition of western-style democracy is a recipe for chaos, poverty and bad roads.

Pointing to post-Soviet economic collapse and the revival of authoritarian rule in Russia under President Vladimir Putin, Asian authoritarians make a plausible case that Soviet political reform was much too fast. It may not be his job, but Rumsfeld has argued convincingly that Chinese reform is much too slow.

I completely agree, as I argued in April.

Now, the largest argument against this — and the most valid — is that people in China are more now more concerned with making a prosperous living than they are with creating a liberal democracy, where certain freedoms and rights are guaranteed. I completely agree with this. I see democratization, in the long term, as first economic, political, and then cultural. Right now, the people are trying to harvest the benefits of economic development and don’t care as a whole about too much else. That is, except for government corruption, the result of which is the squandering of billions of dollars and the disruption of economic development. Since both the liberal economic and political thinkers tend to reside in the cities, they would combine agendas into a pressure force against the current regime just as international leverage mounts to allow greater political freedom.

What happens at this point is would be the securing of economic freedom from government influence, and with it, domestic reforms in the political arena. Over decades and generations, this mode of thinking will ingrain itself within the society. And it all starts with economic liberalization; something that expands so swiftly and relentlessly that it can undo thousands of years of thought in a single century. Chinese culture and history, of course, will never be erased, but the forces of liberalization will eventually normalize China and the region with the rest of the world.