I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the Chinese authorities want. What everyone else wants isn't their concern.
> The number of annual protests has grown steadily since the early 1990s, from approximately 8700 “mass group incidents” in 1993[1] to over 87,000 in 2005.[2] In 2006, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimated the number of annual mass incidents to exceed 90,000, and Chinese sociology professor Sun Liping estimated 180,000 incidents in 2010.[3][4] Mass incidents are defined broadly as "planned or impromptu gathering that forms because of internal contradictions", and can include public speeches or demonstrations, physical clashes, public airings of grievances, and other group behaviors that are seen as disrupting social stability.
The Chinese Civil War of '49 and then the Cultural Revolution (where most of the then-current Party leadership suffered) is still within living memory of the ruling class. Of course they understand that there is an implicit contract between themselves and the rest of society, even if it the terms of the deal are not arrived at in a democratic fashion.
The question is not whether China will eventually devolve more political power to the populace——that is almost a given, considering the growing economic and cultural power of the middle class; it's whether this will happen suddenly and violently via another revolution, or gradually by the Party bringing dissenting voices into the fold widening the circle of acceptable, public political discourse.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/china/2013/01/15/chinese-societ...
And it would be so good -- for the people of China more than for anyone else. But it would be good for us all.
Yet, it's difficult to watch Xi's tenure unfold and not have worrisome questions about the inevitability of this result, especially given new technologies available to potentially aspiring totalitarians.
This idea was popular in 2013 when this article was written, but Xi's regime has indeed shown that greater prosperity can be had with increased repression. Turmoil in America only underlines this.
for now, anyway. plenty of looming societal issues remain uncertain until we see how they unfold: their aging population, lack of social safety net, mounting domestic unrest, increasing lack of labor cost competitiveness, etc.
As a Chinese-American, I see both sides of this issue, but China's own long political development sees the role of the state explicitly as a paternal protector. The state represents and protects the people's interests, without their explicit participation.
This is obviously alien to a modern Western mindset that sees political legitimacy as only deriving from elections, but that means that even early modern states (e.g. 19th century Britain or the US) is politically illegitimate since the franchise was restricted to a very small slice of property owners.
What Britain or the US did in the 18th or 19th century is not relevant to the discussion, what matters is today.
It is not a Western mindset to think that lack of participation in the political process leads to repression. Lack of participation, or the inability to participate, is in itself a form of repression.
Who invented democracy? Who were its earliest proponents, and later 'rediscoverers' and adopters during the late Enlightenment? Does not the culture and the government co-evolve with one another over time, such that they form a single functioning unit?
On the contrary, it is the idea that the formal system of government can be completely shorn of the context of the society and the cultural mores from which they arise that is naive.
The failure of the majority of states outside of the West to be democracies in actual fact even when they have the formal process of elections should demonstrate that simply imposing a foreign system of rule on a nation that has no experience with it is highly unwise. How well have the democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan turned out?
I find it pretty surprising that you speak with such certainty and conviction about Western liberal democracy when the
I'll leave you with this quote from Aristotle, who certainly believed there was a relationship between the people and the form of governance they could attain:
"The nations inhabiting the cold places and those of Europe are full of spirit but somewhat deficient in intelligence and skill, so that they continue comparatively free, but lacking in political organization and capacity to rule their neighbors. The peoples of Asia on the other hand are intelligent and skillful in temperament, but lack spirit, so that they are in continuous subjection and slavery. But the Greek race participates in both characters, just as it occupies the middle position geographically, for it is both spirited and intelligent; hence it continues to be free and to have very good political institutions, and to be capable of ruling all mankind if it attains constitutional unity." [1]
Agree or disagree with his (perhaps chauvinistic) assessment of his own people, but he at least realizes that governmental forms do not exist in a vacuum.
> This kind of thinking is also used as a defensive tool against real debate about the morality of what China does.
I would love to have a moral debate about what China is doing, but that would require moving beyond a reactive 'they are not a democracy, and hence automatically wrong'. I am saying this as a Chinese person whose family personally greatly suffered during the Cultural Revolution.
Let's have a real conversation about, what the proper role of government is, what its ends ought to be, and how that interacts with the experience of its host civilization and its history.
[1] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
Fake prosperity between 2012 and now. 300%+ debt ratio. High government debt. High (state) corporate debt. creeping up Household debt. Several provinces disclosed 20-30% fake revenue. Xi's government now stresses stability over GDP growth (sign of weakness). Several high-level Chinese economists warn of an economic crash in China.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/07/chinas-crackdown-on-money-fl...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-s-insurance-regulator-to-...