it was a day that the chinese air force had decided to go fly the stealth fighter for the first time. of course secretary gates asked president hu jintao about it and he stared at him blankly and said "we flew what?" it went all the way down the line until they hit the first guy in uniform who nodded yes and said of course we do. they said we did not mean to do this to embarrass you. i am sure that hu jintao did not know that the stealth fighter was going to beat flight tested the previous week. this gave us an opportunity, without putting labels on it, to write a fair bit about different interest groups within china and how they see their approaches, how you have a more internationalist group in the leadership, how you had a different element within the chinese military, how that element has gotten a wealthy enough an independent enough from the communist party that nobody felt they had to go call in and get permission to fly the stealth fighter that day. i suspect that had somebody in the chinese military tried that with chairman mao, he would probably be cleaning out the bathroom s