Flutterby™! : Gates goes commie

Wow, this is extra topical, since on today's hike some of the discussion was about apologists for Stalin, and how various people on the American left talked about the Soviet Union as "the great experiment" up into even the late 1970s. Bill has leant me Koba the Dread : Laughter and the Twenty Million, which I look forward to reading, but it was quite interesting to get this link right before that discussion: Bill Gates praising the Chinese government:

Gates continued by heaping praise on the current generation of Chinese leaders.

"They're smart," he said with emphasis.

"They have this mericratic way of picking people for these government posts where you rotate into the university and really think about state allocation of resources and the welfare of the country and then you rotate back into some bureaucratic position."