Part 5/9:
Ben Norton’s commentary in these seminars is highly controversial. He claims, for example, that China is a “strong democracy,” a description that diverges sharply from Western definitions of democratic governance. Norton also asserts that China enjoys some of the highest levels of government approval worldwide and that its economic growth has surpassed that of the US—a claim widely dismissed by experts who attribute China’s recent economic slowdown to increased state control and crackdowns on private enterprise.