The "C" in Celestron now stands for COMMUNIST!

During the 1950s the PRC killed millions of Chinese people who
were _not_ "willing to set aside or defer political and individual
freedoms in the pursuit of economic wealth". They would rather have
had liberty, which in America is the freedom of individual action
towards goals that one sets for one's self in order to create and keep
wealth, trade freely, and prosper.

You make it sound like the millions who died in this period (1950s)
were freedom fighters. Not quite, this is what actually happened:

"In an attempt to restructure China's primarily agrarian economy, Mao
undertook the 'Great Leap Forward' campaign in 1958, a disastrous
program that aimed to combine the establishment of rural communes with
a crash program of village industrialization. The Great Leap forced the
abandonment of farming activities, leading to widespread famine in
which more than 20 million people died of malnutrition." Source:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0107411.html

I don't deny what happened during the cultural revolution but let's not
forget that this thread is about PRESENT-DAY China, i.e., post Mao,
post Deng. The current regime has no great human rights record either,
but given what happened to the USSR and other east-bloc countries,
China has not only managed to avoid economic disaster but also it's own
break-up. There is a reason why the PRC flag has five stars.

It's irrelevant if I'm sympathetic to the "party line" or even if I'm
their ****ing parrot, so long as you recognize that you and just about
everyone in America will still be queuing up to buy from the "party",
consciously or not, to your liking or not, for the next, what, century
or more?

Look at it another way. Taking your and Rich's logic one step further,
should the PRC ask themselves, as a gov't or as a people, why they
would trade with a nation that has supported or instituted repressive,
undemocratic and cruel regimes and/or has and continues to invade
dozens of sovereign nations, whilst in the name of "freedom" and "war
on terror" but ultimately in the pursuit of self-interest and
consequently having inflicted countless loss of life, unimaginable
suffering and endless economic and social turmoil?

So get off of your high horse.

AstroHoney