Not at all. I argue that people act to protect what they have, and Chinese people are no exception.

I wrote, "the hundreds of millions of rural poor or the conquered peoples who never wanted anything to do with Beijing". The second "the" marks a separate phrase.

Your own source notes that the fruits of this expansion have been distributed unequally and that government policies have exacerbated the situation.

I would rather discuss China as China, but I would be remiss not to point out that the US government's poverty line is more than 20 times higher than the World Bank's. In fact, it's just under the World Bank's definition of high income. (Incidentally, the official US poverty rate has fluctuated between 11 and 16% since 1965. The Wikipedia article cites an offline source for the alternative figures but doesn't explain the small discrepancy.)

The latest World Bank numbers retroactively raise the poverty line, giving China a poverty rate of 84% in 1981 and 16% in 2005. Whatever numbers one uses, most of the reduction was in the early 1980s, and most of it seems attributable to reversing the failed policies that produced such shocking poverty. This was vital, but singling out China diminishes the accomplishments of other countries that avoided China's mistakes.

The World Bank itself acknowledges that any poverty threshold is arbitrary. (It's too bad this message gets lost whenever it publishes another round of estimates.) The effects of poverty are numerous and continuous, and calculations of purchasing power parity are not nearly as precise as the numbers imply. In other words, poverty is relative.

Why would I expect the privileged class to rock the boat? They're the ones who benefit from the status quo, not the hundreds of millions of rural poor or the conquered peoples who never wanted anything to do with Beijing.

Slavery was a source of contention between Northern and Southern states from the beginning. Every state north of Delaware abolished it by 1804. It remained legal in Britain until 1840.

Taxes in the colonies were relatively low.

Neither country guaranteed all women the right to vote until the 1920s. A large minority of British men were disenfranchised by property requirements until after World War I, and a significant number of landowners could vote in multiple districts until 1948.

It's not too far off. NIH funds more biomedical research than anyone else, and it has rules about sharing resources.

Hey, altruism is serious business.

Etymologically, the 'copy' in 'copyright' refers to the original work. The earliest copyright statutes restricted printing specifically. When the laws were broadened much later, it was primarily to cover new technologies for publishing works, like the phonograph. Copyright includes an exclusive right to reproduction because technologies to reproduce information grew diverse before they grew cheap.

The article talks about "permanently altering DNA", but the paper is about changes in gene expression, how genes are turned into functional products.

1000 AUD is about 600 USD, which seems in line with the competition.