In the long term, in order to survive, the Chinese Communist Party will have to renew its pact with its citizens and make itself more accountable and less brutal. But, as of now, its record of poverty alleviation and modernization is unprecedented. China is not Germany or Japan of the 1930s, nor is it the Soviet Union in the 1940s or Iraq or Libya in the early twenty-first century. Nor is it an expanding ancient Athens, any more than the United States is a retreating ancient Sparta.
