What do you think of China?

What do you think of China? Because I don't know.

I admire their work ethic, how could they have come so far so quickly, they have, with our help/connivence, caught up with western technology - just look at the Chinese rip-offs of eReader Kindle and many other electronic devices.

Of course a lot of the ideas they have are stolen from western companies, they rampantly steal copyright material (music, software), they steal Intellectual Property (designs, patents). But who is to say our own copyright/IP protection system is not too tight and inhibits creativity? Look at the squabble just starting between Apple and Nokia, who both want to have the other's products banned from import into America because of patent claims.

Every T shirt on the high street and much of everything else we wear, comes from China. We lose style, but gain price. Have we found our own price point?

They have the death penalty. And I am absolutely against that. In fact the Chinese state murders more people in a year than anyone else. That is truly shameful. We have the European Declaration of Human Rights and stick to it, although the Conservatives want to change this...

They have persistently undervalued their currency and violently distorted the financial markets, hoarding huge amounts of dollars and euro, but not floating the Yuan. They have used these dollars and euro to buy up western and african assets for future exploitation. But we could have seen this coming, our bankers just stuck their heads in the sand and continued to rip people off and make huge profits.

They censor every media, especially the internet - Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and thousands of other free expression web sites are block by the "Great Firewall" of China. But we are ourselves fighting backwards thinkers who want to restrict the internet's ability to freely transfer information.

They engage in computer hacking and cyber attacks - read what Google has to say about that last week. But then who knows what GCHQ get up to.

But they are a people. part of our world, we could make a similar case out of almost any nation. And they do contribute to world culture.

What do you think of the Chinese?