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Well, let me tell you a little bit more about this historic "dictatorship" in China.In Ming dynasty (1368–1644), for example, the Prime Minister and Cabinet were elected by the other officials. How do you get elected? First, you have to pass the National Civil Service Exam with flying colors, then you have to be admitted into the National Academy (sort of like the Graduate School that admits about 20 people out of tens of thousands of exam takers once every 3 years) and study there for 3 years, and then you'll be posted to various posts nationwide. Your job is to improve the people lives at your post - peace and security, roads and bridges, more tax revenue, more students passing the national exams, etc. You start at the bottom. You will receive a mid-term review after 3 years, and a thorough review in the Capital after 6 years. If you get an A, you get a promotion. If you get a B, you stay on the same level. If you get a C, you get a demotion. In all cases, you'll be posted someplace else and another person will take over your previous job. After 30 years of consistent performance and promotions, you get to be eligible to be elected into the Cabinet by your peers.So what you got was a Cabinet and an Administration that were fairly independent from the Emperor. They did not get there because they were appointed by the Emperor. And they had the right to set up general debate, summarize the issues, and propose solutions. What if the Emperor wanted a different solution which was unanimously opposed by the Cabinet? The Cabinet could veto it. As a result,When one of the Emperors pleaded "I have a headache. I can't go to the Court" too many times, an ordinary official told the Emperor in public: "Yes, you are indeed sick. You are sick because you drink too much, you have too much sex, you are too greedy for money, and you are too prone to anger. And now let me tell you in detail why these things are making you sick and how you should change your behavior."When another Emperor, who was a believer of Daoism, made some Daoist hats by hand and presented them to his Cabinet as holiday gifts, he was told by his cabinet minister, "I am an atheist, and I consider your behavior to be beneath the dignity of an emperor."The emperor couldn't take a dime out of the national treasury. Instead, when there's natural disaster, the emperor must cut his personal expenses and donate his own money to the national treasury, which serves to set an example to other rich folks in the country to donate generously to the poor.And what happens when the administration failed to provide peace, mitigate natural disaster, etc.? Well it's the Emperor's fault, of course. So he had to write a public proclamation, detail his wrong-doings, and apologize to the people. This Letter of Apology is then read out to the public by the officials at every town and every village. Some of the emperors had to do this public humiliation like seven times.That's some "dictatorship", eh? How many Cabinet ministers today can do or say this to their bosses in the US, the UK, or other countries? How many presidents or prime ministers have issued public apology? But you see, in China, the top decision-maker, who have access to all the information available, are a group of independent administrators. This continued to this day, when the CCP Politburo, the 7 people in it, are all independent from each other. They didn't get there because Xi appointed them. They were elected independently. Some of them were there before Xi came to power. Some of them are even political rivals of Xi. And all key policy decisions are by consensus of the whole politburo.China briefly experimented with "democracy" in the early 20th century but it quickly degenerated into anarchy and warlordism. But the ancient structure of a republic of the professional administrators, where the entrance is determined by scholarship, IQ, and moral fortitude, where the system seeks to limit the influence of heredity and wealth, seems to be able to improve the livelihood of most people.If you contrast that to, say, the White House. The US Presidency is a true Imperial Presidency. Every cabinet member is appointed by the President. The President can choose from a hundred qualified people. He chooses person X because X is in the same party and s/he will support him.I sometimes wonder if people are just blind. There are enough checks and balances in the domestic policy arena (i.e., state vs. federal, the Congress, the Court, etc.) to ensure things don't go crazy, but there is nothing in the foreign policy arena. The Cabinet, the CIA/NSA, the Pentagon, etc. all work for the president. So the people in the know are not independent, and the people who are independent are not in the know. And you have the result of the last 20 years to show for it. Then you have people screaming "It's all Bush's fault" or "it's all Obama's fault", as if the administrative system isn't set up to produce exactly this kind of results. Do people really think this is the best administration system since the beginning of the civilization? Really?

From the sixth century onwards, a sharp decline began. Trade with the main part of the Roman empire ended in the third century, and the silk trade with Iran and the Byzantium stopped in the mid-sixth century.India carried on some commerce with China and Southeast Asia, but its benefits were reaped by the Arabs who acted as middlemen.In the feudal set-up, horse trade became more important because of military needs. In the sixth century, horses from Persia were imported, and traders did not have to pay custom duties. Before the rise of Islam, the Arabs had virtually monopolized India’s export trade.The decline of trade for well over 300 years after the sixth century is strikingly demonstrated by the virtual absence of gold coins in India. The paucity of metallic money after the sixth century is true not only of north India but also of south India. The decline of trade led to the decay of towns. Towns flourished in west and north India under the Satavahanas and Kushans and a few cities continued to thrive in Gupta times. However, the post-Gupta period witnessed the ruin of many old commercial cities in north India.Excavations show that several towns in Haryana and East Punjab, Purana Qila (Delhi), Mathura, Hastinapur (Meerut district), Shravasti (UP), Kaushambi (near Allahabad), Rajghat (Varanasi) Chirand (Saran district), Vaishali, and Pataliputra began to decline in the Gupta period, and largely disappeared in post-Gupta times. The Chinese pilgrim Hsuan Tsang visited several towns considered sacred on account of their association with the Buddha but found them virtually deserted or dilapidated. On account of the restricted market for Indian exports, artisans and merchants living in these towns flocked to the countryside and took to cultivation.In the late fifth century, a group of silk weavers from the western coast migrated to Mandasor in Malwa, gave up silk weaving, and adopted other professions. On account of the decay of trade and towns, the villages had to meet their needs of oil, salt, spices, cloth, etc., on their own. This gave rise to smaller units of production, each unit meeting its own needs.Most merchants could have become cultivators, but some were appointed managers of land administration. Like temples and brahmanas, some merchants were also granted land by the king in Gupta and post- Gupta times. In such cases, they directly looked after their land grants, but indirectly they looked after grants of lands of which they had been appointed trustees or managers, that is, land endowed on temples and monasteries. The role of the merchants as landlords was linked to the decline of trade and towns

Stalin was not one of the intellectuals. That is why he resented them. But he was an organizer and he understood how to obtain power and how to use it.“World War I broke Czarist power, brought about the 1917 short-lived Kerensky government and the Bolshevik coup d'etat. Stalin got out of Siberia, but took small part in these momentous events. U.S. Journalist John Reed did not even mention him in Ten Days That Shook the World. But Stalin, the Inside Man, emerged as one of the seven members of the party's political bureau and was appointed Commissar of Nationalities. Joked Lenin: "No intelligence is needed, that is why we've put Stalin there.'' ““Among the Socialist intellectuals of her home town, the swarthy, shock-haired Georgian added nothing to the brilliant debates in which such men as Lunacharsky, Commissar of Education, the historian Pokrovsky, and Ryazanov, biographer of Marx, took part. His harsh Georgian accent put him at a disadvantage in public speechmaking. Someone asked: "Who is Stalin?" Snapped Trotsky: "The most eminent mediocrity in the Party." But Stalin worked purposefully in committees. His Nationalities Commissariat, which had begun with a bare table in a bare room, numbered hundreds of "experts" and his control extended over 65 million of Russia's 140 million people. ““At the end of the Civil War, Lenin decided to remove hostile, corrupt and unreliable elements from his organization and created the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, called Rabkrin (to purge the administration), and the Orgburo (to purge the party). Joseph Stalin directed both. Soon he was running the party's day-to-day business. Early in 1922 the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee was created for him. The title suited him: it sounded innocuous. Stalin was ever contemptuous of trappings; the job could be made all powerful, and to Stalin, reality counted.”Death In The Kremlin: Killer of the MassesBack in 1931, when Stalin was ruthlessly liquidating the kulaks in his drive to collectivize the land, he gave one of his rare interviews to outsiders. His guests were George Bernard Shaw and Lady...http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,935828,00.html