Can’t Wait to Have Students Read This
There’s an interesting op-ed in Thursday’s New York Times, “Why China’s Political Model Is Superior.” The author Eric X. Li, makes some claims in it that are beyond radical from an American perspective:
In the history of human governance, spanning thousands of years, there have been two major experiments in democracy. The first was Athens, which lasted a century and a half; the second is the modern West. If one defines democracy as one citizen one vote, American democracy is only 92 years old. In practice it is only 47 years old, if one begins counting after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — far more ephemeral than all but a handful of China’s dynasties.
The power of this piece for helping students develop is that its perspective is so radically foreign. Were any US
