>It seems like the right approach might be to comply as minimally and poorly as you can get away with, while steadily trying to liberalize China through foreign exposure.

I'm assuming this is a joke, because this has been the strategy of the West since Nixon first went to China. And the exact opposite has happened. They engage in a kind of neo-mercantilism, and we basically pretend that if they just open their markets up a little bit more they're one more step toward liberal democracy.