"Any issue that china faces - they seem to figure out how to overcome it."
Apart from running a democratic and open society.
Apart from running a democratic and open society.
Chinese government has a pretty tight grip on the nation's information sources, and has a very significant political and military power. Democracy has no chance to be exported there, as it was exported e.g. to Iraq and Afghanistan (rather unsuccessfully).
Chinese government makes a lot of efforts to keep the political system of China under control, without Western-style democracy (and probably any other). It also makes a lot of efforts to keep China producing and selling a lot of stuff, and becoming better and better at it. It's rather successful on both accounts.
There are a few examples of countries becoming wild economic successes under quite undemocratic regimes: South Korea and Singapore spring to mind. But both are not Communist (or former Communist, since the Chinese seem to have abolished much of their previous communism). Maybe this is why the didn't look so suspicious to the Western public.
I somehow feel like they are overly optimistic but could not find any proof to refute their point (talking about the current US election clearly did not help...). They are mostly upper middle class who worth more than me. So I guess they may be biased? However the taxi drivers seem to have the same view.
An anecdote: none of them want to immigrate (at least to US) and their only major concern seems to be the air quality. Since they can buy everything else from overseas anyway.
I think your sample is skewed. Chinese people from all social classes are immigrating to the US at record rates. The US gets about 25% of all Chinese emigrants each year, a number that's been growing not decreasing. China recently overtook Mexico as the top source for new immigrants in the US.
Look at the number of Chinese students, the number of H-1Bs, and the number of Chinese green card applications for evidence of middle class highly educated immigration.
For less educated immigration, visit any Chinese restaurant in any backwater town in the country. You'll find that the front of house is staffed by an endless supply of new immigrants.
Countries compete in many ways and form of government is just one and might not even be the deciding factor.
This might become a problem for China in the long term but I don't think it's certain.
It is possible that Chinese immigrants are on the rise, but it is not like a Chinese person can easily immigrate to US, legally or not. Comparing the number of Chinese and Mexican is a bit silly, because of the "undocumented".
The number of Chinese students is meaningless as not every student wants or can stay. The number of H-1b may mean something but my feeling is that Chinese are getting less in recent years. Do you have actual data? The green card applications is more direct evidence, but some real data showing the trend would be useful.
Anyway, I think if there is no pacific in the middle and there is no wall at the border. At least 100 million Chinese people would love to move to US...
Democracy makes sense because governments make mistakes and those need to be dealt with. Democracy is able to deal with that very nicely.
At the moment the Chinese government does a very good job and have the benefit of pretty much everyone else in the world who matters being highly interested in seeing China succeed. As longs that doesn't change - and I find it very hard to imagine a scenario where it does - China won't become democratic.
Western world believes in democracy (at least some people do), but it's not generally accepted truth. I think that democracy is stupid, though I don't have anything better to offer.
It was Winston Churchill who said that democracy is the worst system of government, apart from every other system that has ever been tried.
Not to mention that it can devolve into something that's more of a democracy in name only.
Take the upcoming US elections where the choices are, on one hand, a blowhard who wants to build a massive wall to keep out Mexican immigrants, and on the other a corrupt-to-the-core corporate puppet.
This isn't much of a real democracy when parties become so big that more competent people have no chance of running for office without the support of said parties.
Democracy also self-contains the tools to undo itself, as long as someone can convince the majority that it's not only a good idea, but prudent to do so. That is why the transition from democracy to fascism and outright dictatorship can happen quickly.
First they gotta deal with the gender imbalance problem - literally 10s of millions of young men for whom there is no possibility of finding a partner, because the one child policy led to many female babies being discarded. Take a bunch of angry young men who see no future for themselves and you get what's happening now in Afghanistan...
easy, that's a propaganda problem. tell them the enemy stole our women or something like that :P