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How China Defeated Poverty - American Affairs Journal

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Who wrote that the Chinese are “the wisest and best governed people in the world”? That they perfected “morality” as well as “political economy” to such an extent that “in those fields we need to be their disciples”? Today such comments would be presumed to come from the worst kind of “China apologist”—a “shill”—at best deluded, at worst brain­washed. But the man who wrote...

Spring 2022 / Volume VI, Number 1 W ho wrote that the Chinese are “the wisest and best governed people in the world”? 1 That they perfected “morality” as well as “political economy” to such an extent that “in those fields we need to be their disciples”? 2 Today such comments would be presumed to come from the worst kind of “China apologist”—a “shill”—at best deluded, at worst brain­washed. But the man who wrote those words is Voltaire, one of the fathers of the Enlightenment and, as such, a little bit of a father to us all, who live in the world the Enlightenment shaped. That part of Western h

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