Empowering a communist one party state by allowing their upper classes to exploit their own people , build their industrial capacity and international footprint was a disastrous geopolitical blunder decades in the making. We now have documented evidence that even before they joined the WTO the CCP was planning on NOT following the rules and never intended to reform and become democratic. Communism with Chinese values turned out to be a lot like classical communism seen all over the world. After decades since the 1940s of widespread mismanagement that cost the lives of tens of millions of people and violated the rights and oppressed hundreds of millions. the Chinese people were the ones who started to lift themselves out of poverty and misery. Mao ironically greatly reduced the power and influence of the CCP(specially in the countryside) over the population after the massive purges and famines under his regime. It’s a great myth that the CCP can claim any credit for the Chinese miracle. The extend to which they have helped is the extent to which they have stepped back. Still the corruption and oppression of the Chinese people is beyond comprehension and on a scale the world has never seen. The great technological developments of our age have done a great deal to mask the relative disaster China is. As late as 1999 China was 130th in the world in GDP per capita. Lower than they were a decade prior. It was only after Bill Clinton then Bush supported China’s entrance to the WTO, with the delusional expectation that this would make china more democratic and free, that they saw a great GDP expansion. This of course mostly benefited the corrupt elites. After joining they promptly used their own people as slaves, manipulated the currency and capital markets, lied, cheated and stole technologies and IP and dumped cheap goods on the world. It’s true that they have made capital improvements in the country but those pale in comparison to what could’ve been under a free market. China doesn’t have real markets, the justice system is a joke and their ruling party periodic purges itself from dissenting factions as all communists have. It’s an han-ethno supremacist state that oppresses many other languages and cultures within the country. It’s simply an unacceptable state of global affairs. China has proved itself not willing or ready to join the world stage as a modern nation.