

China: Vote as I say - bchjam
http://www.economist.com/node/18836744

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cubeboy
China is interesting. It's not like USA with just a population of 310,000,000,
it has 1,330,000,000 people.

If one group successfully causes enough political unrest, and 5% of the
population supports and follows this group, that's a total of 66,500 000
people, the current population of the UK. Its astounding when you start
looking at numbers like this. USA, UK, Europe and the Western world will just
be a distant memory when China and India start becoming major players.

How can a democracy successfully emerge when you have the potential to
introduce great divergence and even possibly civil war?

~~~
code_duck
> USA, UK, Europe and the Western world will just be a distant memory when
> China and India start becoming major players.

As individual entities, perhaps. As a bloc? NATO member countries total
population is about 800 million, if I'm not mistaken. The Western world is
hardly going to disappear.

~~~
vorg
Not just a bloc of NATO countries, but also with Russia, which seems to be
eagerly invited into organizations such as G8 (= G7 + Russia). With Russia,
Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, the total population of such a bloc is 1 billion. I
can forsee the US, France, Germany, and Russia soon forming a proto-military
alliance, to give them the option to counter-balance China if they need to one
day.

And of course the US, unlike China, has immigration as its foundation. They
could accept, say, 20 million educated and/or wealthy immigrants from China
over the next 20 years, with no shortage of takers (
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2660178> ), which would strengthen
America and weaken China.

~~~
dimmuborgir
Russia has always been against NATO and lately it is pushing hard for a strong
SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) [1] which is branded as
Russia's/China's answer to NATO.

The current major issue with SCO though is it needs either India or Pakistan
or both as its members to make it a formidable military alliance. But since
India and Pakistan are archrivals there are differences between Russia, which
has always backed India, and China, which has always backed Pakistan.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Cooperation_Organisati...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Cooperation_Organisation)

~~~
cabalamat
> Russia has always been against NATO and lately it is pushing hard for a
> strong SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) [1] which is branded as
> Russia's/China's answer to NATO.

This is true. In the long term, Russia needs to decide whether it wants to be
a satellite of China, or part of NATO / the West.

Bear in mind that SCO isn't actually a military alliance (with mutual defence
obligations) _yet_ , although it may become so in the future.

------
tokenadult
Genuinely independent electoral candidates in Taiwan, who in some cases won
executive offices with substantial decision-making power, first ran decades
ago. Even when Taiwan was unmistakably a one-party dictatorship (the first
time I lived there), there was more contesting of more consequential elections
than there yet is in China. China has a LONG way to go to all of its talented,
diligent people opportunity to shape the policies they live under.

------
known
Voting in elections != Democracy

