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Lagerwey criticizes the very dichotomy between China and the West, emphasizing the long history of cultural borrowings that makes any clear distinction pointless. Rather than imagining competing, culturally specific visions of democracy, he cites the US Declaration of Independence, with all its historical specificity, as the expression of a set of universal human values in which human beings everywhere 'aspire to the same things.' While he refers to the right of a people to 'throw off' despotism, suggesting an emancipatory inclination, his insistence on the inevitability of such a movement implies a passive determinism that would obviate the need to concretely criticize any current Chinese policies. Adapted from the source document.