Between you, me, and this fortune cookie here, I've had it with China. For a while there, things were going swimmingly—Mao croaked, peasant farmers were getting land leases, literacy rates skyrocketed, and economic reforms were lighting a much-needed fire under Communism's rear end. Even after the Tiananmen debacle, China went on to lift some 150 million of its people out of poverty over the course of the '90s. It was all going so well.

And then it went to shit. China tried to straddle the line between laissez-faire capitalist world power and dreaded Communist regime. Maybe no one in Beijing has read Thomas Friedman, but that ain't the way the world works. You've got to at least make it look like you're a free society, even if every significant decision of state is made by lobbyists behind closed doors. China does not seem to have gotten the memo. They've been strong-arming sweet, liberal little Taiwan; bending once-mighty Google to their evil will; luring us into a massive and ineradicable trade deficit. And they're about to execute a white-collar criminal for duping investors out of $385 million dollars in an ant-farming scheme. The death sentence for fraud? Is China out of its mind?

Apparently. Look at the U.S., the Hummer-driving, blood-diamond-encrusted playboy of the Western world—our whole country is built on screwing other people. Those ant-farming investors are obviously schmucks, and they were getting rolled by someone who knew an opportunity when he saw it. In the U.S., that sort of behavior would land you in an escort-filled Jacuzzi; in China, it puts you in front of a firing squad. Somewhere on the road to capitalist decadence, China lost its way. I just hope it gets an assful of prickers before it finds its way back.—Alex Littlefield

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• The ants must be avenged
• Well, if the Waltons like them ...