Steering the flagship farming state of Nebraska, Gov. Pete Ricketts has been all about opening doors for the world’s markets to access his state’s plentiful produce. From top-quality beef raised on the lush Great Plains pastures to the premier agri-tech that assists the growing of crops around the world, Nebraska has been exporting billions of dollars worth of products, a lot of it to East Asia. It made perfect sense to Ricketts to lead a trade mission to China in 2016 in an effort to expand the market further yet. What happened on the trip, and in the following years, however, gave the Republican a rude awakening. China started opening up to foreign trade in the 1970s, after the death of Mao Zedong brought an end to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, which had left the country on the brink of economic collapse. Bit by bit, the communist regime …