The Chinese believe that [former Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev made a critical, indeed fatal error by tending to assume that economic freedom involves political freedom as well.

Be very slow to believe that you are wiser than all others; it is a fatal but common error

Gorbachev was literally hated in the 1990s. He was seen as the destroyer of the Soviet Union, the destroyer of everything that generations and generations had built. But much of that was fueled in the '90s, as it played into the hands of Boris Yeltsin, his successor in government.

And be it indeed that I have erred, mine error remaineth with myself.

They have shown that it's perfectly possible to manage a very open economy with an authoritarian single-party structure.

There's a three-way struggle or contest going on with the Central Asian republics, involving Russia, China, and the United States. Beijing is pursuing a very active diplomacy at the moment, [not only] in Central Asia [but in] the South Pacific, Latin America, Africa, which it can afford to do because of its enormous economic gravitational pull.