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In 1978, Deng Xiaoping began the economic reforms now referred to as Gaige Kaifang, through which China ushered in an era of unprecedented receptivity to foreign influence. The shift to liberalized trade policy led to reduced poverty levels and set China on the path to economic strength. But the reforms also catalyzed massive change within the formerly centralized medical system. Medicine is now the domain of the private sector, along with provincial and local governments, rather than the national authorities. While market reforms in the economy have been a boon for the Chinese, similar reforms in the health care system have improved quality but also created unequal access to health care due to rising costs.
The 20th century was the most violent in the history of mankind. Looking back across the war-torn century, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan voiced the blood-soaked wisdom of the era in a 1999 speech to the UN General Assembly and urged for the next hundred years to be more peaceful. After a century marked by such violations-from the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust during World War II to the horrific reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and from Slobodan Milosevic's "ethnic cleansing" campaign in Bosnia to the brutal Rwandan genocide-one lesson seemed clear: The timidity of the international community in allowing crimes against humanity to go unstopped or unpunished because of state sovereignty, was unforgivable. Throughout the century, millions had died at the hands of their own governments while the world watched and did nothing.
Taking this lesson to heart, US President Bill Clinton stated in 2000 that the United States had the right to intervene in any country it deemed to be abusing the human rights of its citizens, based solely on humanitarian grounds. It was a far cry from the turn of the nineteenth century, when the inviolable tenet of state sovereignty prevented punishment of even the most heinous crimes by state leaders.
A decade into this new century, looking back at two bloody-and ongoing-conflicts that the United States and its allies justified at least in part or in retrospect on humanitarian grounds, it is evident that repenting for the international community's inaction in the 20th century has likewise proven deadly and troublesome. Indeed, since the beginning of...