The second one stops you cold, until you remember that China is as corrupt as all hell. Those with power will continue to do exactly as they please.
This I agree with you on mostly - it's not lawless, but definitely knowing the right palm to grease or being a member of the right family or party will get you a long, long ways in the mainland.
There are no surprises here, except to those dumb and immoral enough to do business with and invest in communist China.
I don't know about this. To me, it seems like trade often opens a lot of borders and helps spread wealth and education. The employees at the semiconductor plants I worked in in China were in better shape financially and better educated than their counterparts on the rice farms. To me, this seems like a (very slow) path to freedom, rather than a downgrade. Yes, the Japanese and European companies that owned the fabs were there because they could employ people and purchase land for pennies on the dollar vs. anywhere else, but it doesn't have to be entirely one-sided. An educated employee that can read is a big bonus on even a basic high-tech factory line, and an educated populace is more likely to desire democracy.
Hong Kong and Beijing are two of the most 'free' cities largely because of the amount of trade going through them. I don't admire the mainland Chinese government, but I'm not sure ostracizing them from the world community would make them be more reasonable.
Best I can tell, the Chinese government realizes these dangers to some degree - hence the customs checkpoints between mainland and Hong Kong being still active. But those checkpoints don't stop the spread of ideas very well...
Gentoo has that feature. Use the --pretend argument. For instance "emerge --pretend kde" on my machine would display
Calculating dependencies
[ebuild N ] sys-libs/lib-compat-1.0-r2
[ebuild N ] sys-devel/ld.so-1.9.11-r2
[ebuild U ] x11-libs/qt-3.0.5-r2
[ebuild N ] net-print/cups-1.1.15-r2
[ebuild N ] media-gfx/gimp-print-4.2.1
[ebuild N ] app-text/ghostscript-7.05.5
[ebuild N ] net-nds/portmap-5b-r6
[ebuild N ] app-admin/fam-oss-2.6.9
and so on.
Plus I'm in one of the far corners of the world (Santa Fe, NM) that DOESN'T have broadband everywhere so I have to do all this downloading over dial up.
Remember, you are downloading the source, which is a fraction the size of a binary. Having dialup instead of broadband is a better reason to use gentoo instead of another distro.
The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. -- Paul Erlich
