I assumed that huge portions of the Earth -- eastern Europe, Russian, China, Vietnam, Cuba -- were filled with frowning downtrodden people. Cold War-era Disney movies taught me that the few people in these countries who hadn't already given up hope were fighting desparately to escape to the West. They were digging tunnels and sewing home-made hot air balloons and braving rough seas in old boats just to escape their repressive countries.

Even relatively recent newscasts continued to support these views. The Tiananmen Massacre, of course, but also the the repression of the Fulon Gong movement from this year told me there were still teeming millions asking for freedom. These causes are favorite filler material for American nightly news. When Tom Brokaw tells you that the Burmese goverment won't allow Nobel Prize winning freedom fighter Aung San Suu Kyi to visit her dying husband in Britain, you can't help but think the the world would be such a happier place if those darn Communists would just admit they were wrong and give in to the American way.

Carrying this feelings, then, it came as quite a shock when I stepped off the plane in Beijing into a whole country full of smiling, flag-waving Chinese people. Where were the democracy protesters? Or at least shouldn't there be a few people standing around who were less than excited about their oppressive government? But these people weren't just happy, they were happy to be Chinese communisits!

As we continued our travels through the communist countries of China, Laos, and Vietnam, I've come to believe two things. First, I learned that it's possible to be communist and to be genuinely happy and proud of your country. I had assumed that aside from a small minority of hard core party cadres, most of the population would be a simmering hot-bed of anti-government sentiment, kept in check by secret police and undercover informers. At best, I figured people would reach sort of a head-in-the-sand neutrality, just wanting to go about their lives disengaged from their government as much as possible. But all around us we saw flag wavers and people wearing red armbands with the yellow star. In Vietnam it was the same. Not just ambivelance, but excitement.

Thinking back to my travels in East Berlin, then, I have decided that the unhappiness I saw didn't come from their being Communist but rather from their being -- for lack of a better word -- losers. I don't mean individually losers, but that their country lost. They were occupied by a foreign force. In contrast, here in China and Vietnam, people saw themselves as winners. Communists rebels always throw words like "liberation" around when talking about their battles, and those propoganda films are a whole lot easier to make in a country like Vietnam where you really did fight off foriegn rule, first France, then America. Heck, if I were a Vietnamese villager, even I weren't a communist, I'd take at least a little pride in the fact that my country fought off a powerful well funded American force. Everyone likes the underdog.

The second thing I've learned is that Communism and Capitalism aren't opposites. They aren't mutually exclusive. Maybe they used to be, but they aren't any more. From what I've seen, all "communism" means is that there is a single party in control of the government, and that they want to keep control of the government. That's it. All the other stuff we associate with Communism such as collectives, work-camps, and control of the press, that stuff ebbs and flows to serve the party, but none of it is required as a core component of today's communist country.

In fact, it seems to me that on an individual basis the spirit of Capitalism is more evident in China and Vietnam than in America. In America, the capitalist battles are fought at the corporate level, locked behind board rooms up high in office buildings. Huge mega-corporations fight for market share and stock value, while the Average Joe has a salary and a nine-to-five job. But here, each person seems to have his own one-person business. They may just be selling you postcards or taxi rides, but everyone is jumping on the bandwagon, trying to figure out how to be a tour guide or open a guesthouse. They teach themselves English at night because they see an economic benefit to doing so. It's the same small, family-owned, self-starter business that America points to as the reason it is so great, and the same thing we are in danger of losing as all our small companies are bought out by Time Warner or General Electric.

We arrived in Beijing just after the close of the 2000 Olypmic Games in Sydney. It was an interesting time to be in Beijing, because the Chinese government is campaigning heavily to host the 2008 Games, and the success of the Sydney games just raised their excitement to a fevor pitch. All over Beijing, the government had commissioned huge floral arrangements hundreds of yards wide with the "Beijing 2008" Olympic logo. Each day, the state-owned paper had headlines about the measures that were being taken to get the games. They were displacing thousands of people so that they could knock down their aprtment buildinds to make room for an athlete's village, parks, and other Olympic-friendly venues.

I bring this up because their efforts demonstrate one advantage of the Communist system. If they want something done, they just do it. Without a partisan Congress to bog things down and without pesky issues like human rights getting in the way, many of the obstacles are removed. This pragmatic steamrolloer approach is seen again and again. Need electricity? Build the Three Gorges Damn, regardless of the human and environmental toll. Need tourist dollars? Let's stop burning temples and restore them instead. It may not be the most moral or humanitarian of philosophies, but it's something the rest of the world need to watch out for, because as soon as China puts its mind to something, it will do it.

So what's the moral of the story? Well, it isn't that Communism is the right answer, that's for sure. It's wrong for humanitarian reasons and it's wrong economically as well. Just look at the famine in North Korea for an obvious example.