> in the long term it never works out because sooner or later an idiot and/or asshole will plant their arsecheeks on the throne, after which you're fucked.
Seems like this can happen in a democracy just the same.
No system is completely immune of course, but it's exceedingly rare for a dictatorship to remain stable and benign for for even just a few decades, never mind hundreds of years.
Zhou dynasty lasted for 790 years. Does that count?
I think it's interesting to talk about. India is a democracy, yet its development is so far behind China in virtually all aspects. Democracy in India seems to create a ton of in-fighting, indecision, and lack of will power. It seems far more corrupt than China as well. India seems stuck while China leads the world in many areas.
So it doesn't seem like a democracy works for all nations (depending on what you measure). Democracy has clearly worked for many. But not all.
But when you compare Taiwan to China, which has the same culture, people and is a much better comparison, you can clearly see how much better democracies perform.
Taiwanese people have a life expectancy of 81 to Chinas 76 years.
Taiwans GDP per capita is 33k vs 13k of China.
So Chinas regime is stealing 5 years and 2/3rd of the income of its people.
Taiwan had a much earlier head start and far fewer problems though.
But even so, if you look at life in Tier 1 Chinese cities and Taipei, I think Chinese cities are ahead. I spent quite a bit of time living in Taipei before and have visited a few T1 Chinese cities.
Life in Taiwan is really not that much different than China.
You can look at this. Local purchasing power is actually higher in Shenzhen than in Taipei. People earn a higher salary and have lower living cost in Shenzhen than in Taipei. Not only that, Shenzhen felt more convenient, cleaner, more technologically advanced, and newer. If not for the internet block situation, I'd definitely prefer to live in Shenzhen than Taiwan.
Perhaps rural Taiwan is better than rural China. But that's to be expected because of the late start in China and just far more people.
So Chinas regime is stealing 5 years and 2/3rd of the income of its people.
I don't think you can say this. We have to look at projections and trends. We know China had a very late start due to Mao being an inept leader. Many places barely had running water and electricity 30 years ago.
Taiwan also has the economic privilege drawing from the US well and the China well. Taiwanese people can live and open business in China freely while also doing business freely with the US. Foxconn is a Taiwanese company that exploited Chinese labor and sold to American businesses as an example.
Even with that, the only industry where you can definitively say Taiwan is ahead of China is chips. That's it. That's mostly to do with ASML not allowed to sell EUV machines to China and China has to do the whole chip supply chain from scratch.
This is disingenuous - it's like saying "Look at Dubai! UAE is the most advanced nation in the world!" You don't get to ignore rural China, those people count.
The average life in Taiwan is very different from the average life in China, even if the top 10%ers live more or less the same.
Going back to my original point - this viewpoint you are espousing right now is setting yourself (and the CCP) up for a fall. China has had a good run for the last few decades and it's tempting to imagine that trajectory will continue perpetually. Lots of suddenly rich people get the same idea, and it ends poorly when reality fails to match their grandiose expectations.
You can see it a lot in this thread - "China is the future! Look how modern and world class!" I'm old enough to remember this said about Japan, and Korea. It didn't turn out that way and it's not looking like it's going to turn out that way for China either. Growth is leveling off, the economy is struggling with massive malinvestment in real estate, and serious people are throwing around the term "demographic collapse". All on top of a potential collapse of world trade.
Do I think China will "fail"? No, not at all. But I don't think it's going to live up to the expectations you're setting. And then it will be interesting to see what happens to the CCP.
Seems like this can happen in a democracy just the same.