Continued from the previous post where we've been looking at adoptions from China.

Does China's system of government, which of course includes their system for international adoptions, show itself to be an exemplary example countries like Cambodia and Guatemala should emulate? Should that standard be the template others should mirror?

Some would have it that the reason China's adoption process is so rarely criticized has everything to do with the country's status as a burgeoning economic powerhouse and political hot potato and nothing to do with the realities of its adoption program.

Human rights abuses in China are well documented, as is proof of corruption in the country's government. Transparency in the sense that we understand is virtually nonexistent in many areas under the communist regime that has held power for decades, and whistle-blowers are not welcome, to say the least.

It was only after the global outrage ignited by the secretly filmed documentary "They Dying Rooms" that an embarrassed China was prodded into reforms of the orphanage systems. Only when caught red-handed did the government force change, and even today access is strictly controlled.

I don't think I was the first to wonder what measures might have been taken by the rest of the world had it been a smaller, less powerful country exposed as the routine torturers of tiny children.

Lest anyone choose to think that consequences for bad behavior aren't mitigated by China's ever-increasing position of power, or by the potential markets its masses provide to global business, a look at the country's support for the some of the the world's most brutal regimes and the lack of criticism incurred by the alliances China makes and keeps in direct opposition to all definitions of what constitutes rightness might enlighten.

Think Burma. Think Sudan. Think North Korea.

All of these are countries whose people suffer under the cruel treatment of governments that could not exist, much less flourish, without not only the implicit permission of the Chinese to murder, pillage, rape and plunder, but their direct support for the people doing the murdering, pillaging, raping and plundering.

Continued in the next post.