Comment by terminalshort
3 months ago
The argument you will hear from Americans and Europeans is that in order for it to be a "democracy" that anybody has to be able to vote. This is, of course, hypocritical because not a single one of those countries allows everyone to vote. And, just like China, every one of those countries has powerful government officials that are appointed by other government officials rather than elected by the public. And in many of them there is a parliamentary system where the public does not get to vote on the head of state, but rather the head of state is elected by the parliament.
In fact, the US republic at its beginning was more similar to China. The president and Senate were elected by the state legislatures, not the public.
There are other things that are critical to democracy to actually function in the spirit of democracy - universal suffrage obviously, and the USA fails in this insomuch as it removed the right to vote from felons and engages in gerrymandering and disenchantment.
However other countries don't suffer the issue to quite the same degree, and the PRC is happy to restrict the right of some people to representation such as the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang. You might say they don't deserve it, I say that's just a justification for disenfranchisement, and a bad one.
You also need to let citizens have the ability to converse and discuss and try to influence each other and who they vote for, and to learn facts about politicians outside of channels that are supportive of the politician. By that I of course mean that mostly free speech and free press are a requirement for a functional democracy, else you could call North Korea a democracy which is of course absurd.
The PRC may get many things right, and hell maybe we are entering The Chinese Century, but regardless it's not immune to criticism, and pretending otherwise just to oppose American hegemony simply hurts one's ability to do so as everyone will just accuse you of being a Little Pink.