> But China proved you can pair authoritarian politics with a market economy. It offers a bargain we thought impossible: prosperity without freedom, development without democracy, safety without expansive civil liberties. And for the billions of people who remember being hungry, who want their kids to have better lives, who care more about rising wages than free speech—it's getting harder to argue they're wrong.

Author sounds like someone who just spent a week-end in the Huxleyan London of Brave New World. Everything is so beautiful. Freedom? Fuck that.