Orange Dave, what you apprea to be talking about is the importance of education for moral development of the individual so that the state can be governed by moral virtue rather than by the use of coercive laws.

Taiwan has absolute freedom of religions whereas China is still an enigma when it comes to not allowing free and open, unfettered practice of religion.

Ever since the Ike years as President in the 1950s I well remember, I was a teenager then, the Qumoy and Matsu Islands challenges by Communist China militarily, which failed ultimately.

China has come a long way since the Nixon days and today the US economy owes China for helping keep our national debtd afloat. The defacto capitalism model for world trade by China has defanged many of the past negative habits of China, I agree. But the issue of freedom of all religions inside mainland China still haunts it, as evidenced recently with Muslim riots in far Western China.

The Deputy Dean of "the" main Medical College of China was visiting the Medical College of Alabama, a part of the University of Alabama at Birmingham campus, in the late 1980s. As the administrator of the VA's Medical Research & Development Division at that time I was asked by our local US medical school dean to take the Chinese Deuty Dean of their main Medical College to lunch.

During lunch the Chinese MD told me that his son was a premed student then at UAB, hoping to be admitted to the Medical College of Alabama in a few years. Secondly he told me that mainland China was (and I suspect still is) very backward internally, this was circa 1989) still very backward, with it's people still eating rice out of iron bowls.

Just to balance some remarks today about mainland China which economically is our main stay in terms of our national debt today.