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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

  if you have a large portion of the population running these dishes, it's game over.

Sadly this is wishful and overly optimistic thinking. The Tiananmen Square protesters thought similarly. Dictators will massacre their own people

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It's not clear how many died in TSquare but it's a few thousands at most. That's very far from the hundred of millions of people China has.

A counter example is the CCP backing down from the Covid restrictions under popular pressure. If enough people put pressure, the government will react.

> Dictators will massacre their own people

You have to be reminded that the government (and the army) are themselves made of the people. This has the interesting consequences that the most brutal ones are actually oil-funded (because they can outsource security) or countries that have a racial/cultural divide (because they can rally one segment of the population against another, ie: Syria).

> It's not clear how many died in TSquare but it's a few thousands at most. That's very far from the hundred of millions of people China has.

Mao did kill off millions in the Great Leap, with no dissent.

Afaik it was not "planned" unlike Stalin and Beria's NKVD - Mao ordered crows killed to increase crop yields not thinking about the consequences of remove a predator from an ecosystem because the smart folks were either ignorant or afraid of going to a re-education camp.

Mass starvation.

Under Mao's rule, millions of people were overtly executed. It wasn't just Mao's incompetence that got people killed accidentally. He ordered millions of people to be murdered.

do you have reference for this? I am Chinese and would like to learn.

The Cultural Revolution.

Mao killed people for mistakes far less than that, didn't he.

I don’t know how you can look at the expansion of democracy worldwide over the 20th century and say it’s just wishful thinking!

By most metrics, democracy is currently in contraction.

The space of democracy is already taken by the leader of the freeworld that dictates how democracy should look like. So if you can't play the game, it is logical to want to play your own game.

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