Maybe one day, if China embraces democracy, it might hope to become as prosperous as India. /s
In all seriousness, "democracy" is at this point almost meaningless as a barometer of good governance. There are a lot of spectacularly successful autocracies and a lot of dismally awful democracies. In the broad scheme of things, the CPC has done a damned good job of advancing the interests of the Chinese people. China might one day gradually transition towards democracy in the manner of Singapore, but many Chinese people are rightly fearful of the possibility of the collapse of the CPC. The most common outcome after the overthrow of a dictatorship is chaos and economic collapse, followed by a much worse dictatorship.
> CPC has done a damned good job of advancing the interests of the Chinese people.
Certainly the nation has modernized rapidly. But at what cost? Western media speaks of famines, proxy wars, land grabs, implicit and explicit suppression of anything/anyone different.
(Not saying other forms of governing are guaranteed to do better, but at least with democracies power is supposed to be more distributed.)
I’m not sure where your sample starts but to start from the beginning one has to take into account the Great Leap Forwards, Cultural Revolution, invasion of Tibet, and so on. The ineptitude and corruption of the Nationalists never approached the suffering of the 50s and 60s which were actively difficult to achieve.
The sole mechanism by which the party became a force for stability is slowly being eliminated: collective leadership in China is now something of a joke. That’s where things went wrong under Mao; it’s why the “bad emperor” problem exists as a concept; and it’s where things are beginning to go wrong at the edges (Xinjiang, Tibet…) under Xi.
If you keep doing ideological flamewar on HN we are going to ban you. Breaking the site guidelines will eventually get your main account banned as well.
In all seriousness, "democracy" is at this point almost meaningless as a barometer of good governance. There are a lot of spectacularly successful autocracies and a lot of dismally awful democracies. In the broad scheme of things, the CPC has done a damned good job of advancing the interests of the Chinese people. China might one day gradually transition towards democracy in the manner of Singapore, but many Chinese people are rightly fearful of the possibility of the collapse of the CPC. The most common outcome after the overthrow of a dictatorship is chaos and economic collapse, followed by a much worse dictatorship.