This week's visit to China by the UK Prime Minister and leading members of the Coalition Government has inevitably raised the issue of human rights, and how these should be handled.
However, the issue is much more entangled than some in Britain might wish, for contemporary China is as much a creation of western consumption patterns, including our insatiable appetites for cheap consumer goods, as it is of communist state capitalism.
Moreover, the West's own record on human rights issues, following the US-UK led intervention in Iraq in 2003, is also currently open to question.
The Chinese interpretation of "human rights" is certainly one that would not be widely countenanced in Western democracies. Nevertheless, for the billions of very poor people in the world, China's development model may be preferred to, say, that of India.
Human population management, something which India has largely rejected in recent years, has certainly played a key role in lifting millions of people out of poverty in China.
Yet the present vulnerability of China to those very Western market forces which have enabled its apparent economic miracle in the past 20 years suggest that this achievement remains precarious and perhaps unsustainable.
There is also the more important underlying question of environmental sustainability in the context of Chinese "growth", and whether this may yet trigger a crisis of Gaian magnitude.
What is certainly needed in this context is freedom of expression, but any criticism of China should bear in mind that there are some subjects in Britain and the West which are still very much politically "off-limits", including resource consumption and population management.
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