+1. When you take what you're saying with the parent above you, Xi is also pulling all the state media strings to play up the less-corrupt benevolence thing - using it to consolidate power. Check out this recent good article about their extrajudicial 'repatriations' which has examples of the bragging in their government controlled media about it (kidnappings).

It's both trying to show less corruption and simultaneously scaring everyone away from dissent. Gross but seems powerful.

https://www.propublica.org/article/operation-fox-hunt-how-ch...

That's maybe true when young people in China first learned western democracy ideas. Nowadays I think most of educated Chinese believe democracy is not suitable for China. They didn't get the whole picture of western world, but who does nowadays. They see signs of culture revolution in western social movements and rejected those wholeheartedly.

Assume for the moment that you're American, liberal, white collar and live in one of the more affluent blue coastal states. Now imagine that 75% of your countrymen are rabbid red state Trump supporters, of low education, get most of their news and information from low quality Facebook shares, and are clearly misinformed about the world in many ways. Now imagine that the Federal government is much more powerful than the States, and that representative democratic policy will mostly reflect the will of Trump True-believers, the people fully supportive of the Capitol riots. How principled are you really about the rule of democracy?

Now I'm not suggesting that this is a good analogy for the Chinese situation, nor that this is how highly education urban Chinese think about democracy (though I do know a few who do seem to think that way). What I am suggesting is that democracy is not always and everywhere the slam dunk win that some Western liberals appear to think it is.

I write this as a second generation immigrant raised since elementary school with Western democratic values. I do believe that despite some flows it is the best system for most of Europe and the US. My parents fled the madness of the Mao CCP regime, and they've probably seen the worst side of the CCP. Yet they are ambivalent whether a US-style democracy today would be superior for the Chinese citizens to the current CCP.

The concern I have with China, right now, is that I suspect liberal democracy in China will be in favor of someone like Donald Trump, who will then have the power to turn it into dictatorship and this time 70% of the population will vote in favor of the Chinese Trump. Or likely a civil war would break out.

The ideological difference within China is not anything less then that of America. The gay marriage issue along could leave the country 80% to 20%, with the liberals on the 20% side. Yet in a authoritorian state like China, I don't think I've heard anything amount to hate crimes like that in the US, A lot of them would be scared to come out, but no one would be murdering them just for their identity. I think the issue with electoral democracy is that every issue is public, in constant debate, and people's political identity became so important to some that they are willing to kill.

People, expats especially, who live in affluent areas of China often lack the knowledge necessary to understand the less-developed areas of China. Like how people in California lack understandings of Alabama.

> When educated Chinese people were better exposed to ideas about liberal democracy, they were very clear that they wanted it

This falls flat for me. So the implication is that there are no educated Chinese today with exposure to liberal democracy? I think we take for granted the supposed superiority of a system that empirically has delivered many recent failures.

I feel like a lot of frustration in the west are due to a lack of voice from within China, who can explain the context and give their point of view. Instead all you get are these disjointed news and headlines without any depth to it. People then make assumptions based on it.

Anecdotally, western democracy was seen as a means to an end for many “common folk Chinese”. The end is prosperity. Now that the prosperity gap has drastically closed (also there are more clear paths to prosperity), the desire has also dissipated. China has also seen a China-like society in Singapore achieve a very strong economic and social outcome with authoritarian government, so western style democracies aren’t the only “role model” so to speak anymore

I think this position is very valuable. By far the best way for us to effect change in China politically, and every other major ideologically opposed nation, is to effect change at home, and be so sucessful that the superiority of our approach cannot be refuted.

Bonus point that there is a lot less chance of war this way.

Yup. People who get their news mostly from Western media might believe Chinese live in a repressive Orwellian hellscape, and conclude that if there is not widespread resentment against the CCP it must be because it's all suppressed. The truth is probably a lot more pedastrian: life in modern China is not bad at all, both in comparison to their own history and compared to other large countries in the world (NOT compared to exlusively rich countries). So a large part of the population is probably at least somewhat content with the current government.

Life is probably far from pleasant if you're an Uyghur or a Falung Gong, but the overwhelming majority of the population is not too concerned with their lot. The CCP clearly does suppress dissent, but it can be targetted to minority opinions.

The median Chinese citizen doesn't just see Western Europe and the USA and concludes that democracy leads to great results. (S)he can also see that it did not appear to bring great prosperity to India, Brazil or Russia.

I'm troubled that your comment was downvoted. It seems very reasonable. Thank you for posting.

I don't understand the premise that the Chinese need to be convinced that the system we live in is the better one. Can we not accept that they are happy with the choices they made, and that not everyone needs to live under a repressive capitalist system?

Thanks, that was interesting.

There is without any bloodshed and without any bloodshed. The Soviet Union fell down with very little bloodshed, but around 7 million people died from the economic disruption, and the democracy that came from it was rapidly compromised both by local oligarchs and foreign powers in most of it.

I don't think the Chinese would want a fall of the USSR scenario, however little the bloodshed is. Economic disruption can kill a lot of people and there is not even any guarantee the next system would stand on it's own.

Don't forget that western liberal democracies look pretty un-attractive at the moment. When the choice is between a raving loony geriatric dementia patient and Trump a lot of people think they'd be better off without.

Nationalists everywhere are insufferable. The aspiration for "lovable" PRC propanda is just aspirational. IMO very little chance PRC will be able to out-propagandize west/US especially among west/US aligned partners. Language/cultural divide too big. I think domestically people will just settle for less cringy interntionational rhetoric, which itself is a losing game since western media will interpret translations with liberty regardless. It doesn't matter that PRC citizens are relatively apolitical on the whole, with 1.4B population statistics there's will always be too many absurd nationals to paint narrative. Really PRC strategy of maintaining different internet/cultural bubbles and targetting msgs at more receptive Chinese diasphora audiences is on point. Once attempt at "lovable" propaganda fails, PRC will pursue Russia style disinformation because ultimately that's whats most pragmatic given the divide and realities of competition. Also more of those PRC cartoons that called out western hypocrisy that was well recieved domestically and made western media look ridiculous by coordinated labelling them photographs. Or calling out Canadian indigenous drama, Australia enviromentalism etc, stuff that has had more ramifcations on the domestic politics of Canada and Australia leaders than west pressing on XJ/HK/Tibet, which Xi doesn't lose sleep over.

That's different, the "slacking" of which you speak is a kind of dissent.

What I mean by "political disengagement" keeping a distance from political issues and otherwise "saying withing the lines," so to speak.