It's maybe a trade-off? Sure we have bozos for politicians in the US, but in the US government corruption usually doesn't lead to people 'disappearing.' Though we're definitely making great strides in that direction.
Now it's interesting, countries can catch up a lot faster than they can lead. If a country is a bit backwards, with the right set of leadership, they can very quickly modernize, becoming extremely important economically and geopolitically in ~30 years when starting almost from scratch. But many of those rapid modernizations peter out once a lot of the proven methods are implemented.
Sometimes that means flat growth, like Japan. Sometimes collapse, like Nazi Germany. Sometimes gradual decline, like the USSR. Singapore has done a pretty outstanding job of keeping their upwards trends going and they're about 50 years into their building phase - I think that's the longest rapid sustained modernization in history?
So anyways, yes, I'll take the USA's system over China's today. And tomorrow. And probably 5 years from now. But maybe not 20 years from now if all else stays equal, and China can adapt after they've caught most of the low hanging fruit.
It's not only leadership. If there is a long track record of commerce and admiration of scholarship, a culture can enable rapid modernization. I think this is why Japan, Korea, and China have done very well for themselves.
Yes, but look at them now. The territories of the former USSR do not constitute the best climate for business. Cultural antecedents are not a necessary pre-condition, but they seem to help.
In population, wealth, etc. sure. But in terms of corruption? Having people who do no harm in power is often better than having people who do great good. If a great leader is just that - great. Not good, but great. Greatness has the capacity for evil and good. The advantage of a less skilled leadership is that they're only really able to do middling things, whether middlingly evil or middlingly good.
We're already seeing work being outsourced from China to even cheaper countries as China's supply of labour becomes fully engaged.
The attitude that I get from a lot of Chinese is that they feel the present government is a necessary evil - i.e., in exchange for many political and religious freedoms, they get progress, and an immense improvement to the quality of life of hundreds of millions... where before there was only starvation and misery. And progress they have gotten, which is more than I can say for us in the last decade or so.
This is exactly what is meant by the Chinese "Civilization State."
http://today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/u-s-needs-to-deepen-its-unde...
I've had Chinese coworkers openly feel sorry for me because I have asian features and I don't know how to read/write Chinese characters, and I'm not even Chinese!
And China is recently tending towards more sophisticated repression, rather than less of it in general. Perhaps the US and China will end up in the same place!