The China threat...

It's always worth remembering that China is far from democratic....

The mainland fishing village of Dongzhou, not far from Hong Kong, was the scene of the fourth event. In perhaps the worse massacre in China since Tiananmen Square, police and locally recruited thugs shot dead up to 30 poor Chinese for protesting the government's confiscating their land for a pittance in order to build a power plant.

Official land grabs, common in China, are one of the main causes of popular protests against the Communist regime, along with corruption of party cadres. Bureaucrats count and report the number of protests -- they say there were 74,000 in 2004. But we don't know what actually happens in the vast majority, including how many people have been killed.

Thousands of police isolated Dongzhou as soon as word of the massacre reached Hong Kong, even denying recovery of bodies to family members, and the authorities cut off all electronic channels of information.

These events underline what we have learned about the Communist dictatorship in Beijing headed by Hu Jintao: its fanatical rejection of democracy and human rights; its single-minded drive to acquire the resources -- including Canadian oil and high-tech -- necessary for economic supremacy; its clear determination to become a military superpower; its unrelenting campaign to dominate other Asian countries; and its systematic brutality to most of the 1.3 billion people of China except party members. More than 50 million Chinese have been killed by Communist rulers.