Comment by rqs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rqs | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> China has embraced the technical aspects of Western society but it looks dangerously like it will carry them with an authoritarian philosophy.

How about tweak the thinking a bit: What's in there for China to totally embraced democracy? Will it become an advantage for the country (Or the leading elites at least), guaranteed? What if the change has failed and lead to something worse?

There are risk factors, and people don't like to take risks. Which is why societal changes are more likely to occur during crisis and disasters, because people simply have nothing to lose anymore.

For CCP, the "Take half the cake" approach is less risky for them, so they did that, and now everybody see what's happened after.

Is your argument that adopting democracy and the rule of law are risky to elites and the ruling party? Well, yeah - that’s sort of self-evidently true.

> How about tweak the thinking a bit: What's in there for China to totally embraced democracy?

Tweak your thinking a bit: the advantage would ultimately be to the anonymous Chinese citizen 50 years from now who wants to vote, express an opinion, join a social group, participate in a religion, petition their government for redress, etc.

> Is your argument that adopting democracy and the rule of law are risky to elites and the ruling party?

No, just trying to explain why China does not go all-in and jump to the democracy train.

CCP apparently don't want to build something (Institution of democracy for example) that will later overthrow them (too risky, even maybe there is something good in it), and elites are bounded with CCP (That's why many of them are allowed to be elites). For CCP, "Without the CCP, There Would Be No New China"[0] is still the safest approach to any domestic problems.

Also, the westerners did not bring democracy into China, so Chinese people are not necessarily benefited from the western democracy. No benefit, no motive.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Without_the_Communist_Party,_T...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com