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.
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%...
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.
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-...