The West is the outlier here. Most of the world has lived under dictatorships for most of history. China is a millenia-old civilization that has never been a democracy. The current regime may fall, but it is not written in the universe that it will progress towards anything resembling a Western democracy.

If I were playing the odds, I'd put money on democracy failing in the west rather than it rising in China in the next century.

That's true but most of the people who have lived have been relatively poor and ignorant. Empirically, there seems to be a transition point in development where democracy goes from making a country less stable to making it more stable and I've actually forgotten exactly what the level was but China will be past it soon if it isn't already. I really have to re-read Wars, Guns, and Votes.

> Empirically, there seems to be a transition point in development where democracy goes from making a country less stable to making it more stable

Even if that was the case for now (lets say e.g. reading or education made the masses harder to oppress), this doesn't mean other developments cannot outperform those effects in a different direction. Especially social media is a recent invention that seems to put a lot of power into the hands of very few. So far they don't seem to wield that power to drastically shape politics of our societies. At least not intentionally. But keeping it this way will be hard, since they either do something to prevent headlines like "A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military" or have them attract the wrong kind of investor. Actually, the latter is probably impossible to avoid long-term, if the US broadcasting industry is something to go by.

The rising political divide in the US is an interesting upcoming case study. I don't see a lot that could revert course, so it will probably end as an anecdote for "less stable". The current US existing for that long is still a remarkable achievement. But we better use the knowledge we gain, since technological progress has made it unacceptable to have our societal systems become unstable every once in a while and needing to be reset violently.

Technically, China was a democracy for a brief period after the Xinhai Revolution at the start of the 20th century.

Democracy was also one of the major themes of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. In these decades, China was busy importing Western ideas because they believed that was the key to rejuvenate China.

The Communist Party eventually won power in China, but it was only following the Korean War that all hope was lost that China could transition to a democracy.

Still, the spectre of democracy remains. The Chinese Communist Party still talks about democracy positively sometimes and the Chinese constitution describes China as a democracy. They do this partly by ignoring what democracy means (the constitution also guarantees "freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration"), and partly by redefining what democracy means. It's Western-style democracy that the CCP treats as an unambiguously bad and dangerous idea.

>The current regime may fall, but it is not written in the universe that it will progress towards anything resembling a Western democracy.

Nowhere in his comment did he say it was. He simply said the situation wold "boil-over"

The West was never a democracy until it suddenly was one. Heads rolled.

Heads rolled in France, but that lead to the totalitarian Jacobin regime. Across the channel in Britain, democracy had been growing slowly since the signing of the Magna Carta began the process of subjecting power to the rule of law, divesting the monarch of the claim to absolute power and distributing that power among institutions such as parliament.

"Never" is an overstatement, since both Rome and Greece had some forms of democracy.

Also, fwiw, the west is the one that can't stop it's out-of-control careening toward climate catastrophe. China's handling it much better.

I'm sorry but China shows no sign of reducing emissions: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/09/22/blogs/dotglobcarb...

Also, have you been to Beijing? The smog is so dense that sometimes you don't see 50m ahead ...

The only thing they're doing is trying to build cheaper electric vehicles.

I’m in Beijing right now and it’s nowhere as bad as you describe (which is how it was ten years ago). Electric cars and scooters are everywhere. China really seems to be trying to get their environmental shit together, it’s just a big project that takes time

I was there yesterday for a few hours and the air looked terrible. didn’t check the actual numbers, but wow was the air ugly.

It depends heavily on the weather, and on the season. No wind -> worse smog, more coal heating (in the winter) -> also worse smog. It does seem to be improving though:

http://img.caixin.com/2018-11-16/1542361119634258.jpg

That's completely false

>My gut feeling is that there will be a day in the future where everything in China is going to boil-over just like any other totalitarian regimes in the past.

Isn't that what happened in the referenced photo? And the regime murdered the protesters and put in place a draconian censorship system to avoid it happening again.

Yes, although, the thing about failure and success is that you can have an unbounded number of failures but you only need one success.

As westerners I feel this is natural to think, and makes sense to us, but having been in China several times I'm not so sure.

The value systems in Asia are far different, and people are much more collective where as we are a more individualist society with different thoughts about individual freedom.

I doubt China could have become as strong as it is today without it's long history of authoritarian regimes, and I feel that many in China believe this to be true. The growing dissent may not be a sign of what's to come but may simply be the growing pains of a totalitarian regime moving into the 21st century. I do not agree with Chinese government but I never underestimate it. There are some smart people working to keep over a billion people under control and productive, and I'm sure they will ultimately find a way that keeps them like that, and can be accepted by it's citizens.

As a Korean I absolutely disagree. Korea has embraced Chinese philosophy in the past, sometimes to such a degree that it was more Confucian than China itself. Yet South Koreans are as zealous about democracy as any western nation.

In fact, there was a time when our own dictator and his followers used exactly the same argument, saying that "Western Democracy" does not fit Asia's unique culture, and we should instead implement "Korean Style Democracy", i.e., authoritarianism. I view them as traitors of our own country and our own culture.

In fact, one of the core tenets of Confucianism is that the monarch is not an absolute ruler but is bound by moral duty. As a classical Confucian text says: 君者舟也, 庶人者水也, 水則載舟, 水則覆舟.

"The monarch is a boat, and people are the water. Water floats the boat, but water also sinks the boat."

That's a fantastic quote. Thanks for sharing it.

This is not a very compelling argument - "They're different from us, therefore we are not in a position to comment." There is a tremendous understanding, analysis and comprehension of totalitarianism in the west. Even in popular culture, say 1984 by George Orwell.

Analyzing widely differing cultures and peoples under the unitary framework of “totalitarianism” isn’t terribly compelling either. The Chinese government has shown remarkable staying power, and it’s important to analyze the ways/reasons it might continue to hold power, since that seems to be a quite likely outcome.

The intuition that western liberal democracy is some sort of inevitable wave is very possibly just an artifact of the US winning WWII.

> The Chinese government has shown remarkable staying power

They are huge, filled with uneducated hungry people. Isn't too remarkable when the government's tactic boils down to "kill dissenters & feed the rest".

Tolerance and diversity normally stops at "it's cool we're doing things differently, as long as nobody gets hurt". Why would you be tolerant of people being abused?

That's a good question to ask police and local government officials in places like Rotherham.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Would you like to expand on the situation?

Blowing that dog whistle hard aren’t you.

Maybe, maybe not. The starting philosophical base of Western Liberal Democracy is that individuals matter, and they have natural rights. That's a compelling narrative.

What does it even mean for a culture to want something?

Only individuals can want something. Societies can't want something; the Earth can't want something; a company or government can't want something.

It's clear that there are individuals in China who do want tolerance. And it's even clearer that there are government officials who are scared of what individuals might start wanting if exposed to ideas of tolerance and democracy.

Saying that the culture wants something is kind of a shorthand. It's more like a function of exactly what every individual in the population wants, how badly they want it, and how they go about ranking various things they want that sort of contradict each other.

I'm going to just skip tolerance here, because it's a complex idea not entirely related.

Let's use Democracy. There are definitely some people in China who want Democracy. There are everywhere. It's not remarkable that some people want it, but the numbers are the important part. If 2% of the people want it, then it's never going to happen. If 40% of the people want it, then it might move that way soon. Thing is, while 2% is a tiny minority, it's still objectively a lot of people. 2% can get you a bunch of activist groups and busy-looking protests and that sort of thing. It's much easier than you might think to look at a 2% movement that you personally agree with and believe that it's a mainstream view, the future of the country, etc, when it actually isn't.

Now that's just an example. Personally, I have no idea what the approval rating of Democratic ideas is in China. Tricky thing about totalitarian countries that practice censorship, it's hard to get an idea of what people really think. I'd like to think that it's a mainstream, growing idea. Clearly the Government is indeed afraid of it enough to go out of their way to censor it. But I worry that we may be fooling ourselves, and it has no real traction.

I would also point out that we don't have entirely clean hands either when it comes to tolerating 2%-size political movements advocating for radical changes to the structure of our government and society. Plenty of examples to pick from, no matter what your political persuasion is. I'm not saying we're as bad as them or anything - they're much, much further down that rabbit hole. I'm just saying that it's much easier than you think to ignore and excuse such abuses when they're against something that you don't like.

Google "The Paradox of Tolerance," if you're allowed to.

Some truths really are self-evident.

I have read it. If you have a point you want to make, you're welcome to make it.

If you didn't get the point when Karl Popper explained it, I doubt I'll be any more effective at conveying it here.

Including myself, there's probably many other people reading this who have not read it and would like one or two of its salient points.

The basic idea is that tolerating totalitarianism is self-defeating, even when done to prop up one's fondest notions of cultural relativism.

This is a good read for the notion. I found it a good starting point when I dug into this a little while ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

> Isn't it rather convenient to convince yourself that everyone in your outgroup is intolerant totalitarians

That's a pretty extreme strawman. I disagree with lots of outgroups, and I only call a couple of them totalitarians.

If someone hates all of the outgroup, they are almost certainly hypocritical and lying to themselves about being tolerant.

If someone hates none of the outgroup, we can agree they're virtuous and special, sure.

If someone hates 15% of the outgroup for specific reasons, that's probably okay. It doesn't automatically imply that they are secretly intolerant. Most people that claim to prioritize tolerance are here, and most of them are telling the truth.

I think we have a disagreement on the definition of the term "outgroup". The article I linked goes into more detail, but I'd say that an outgroup is defined by being the group that you hate, not necessarily just those who are different from you in some way. It doesn't make sense to talk about what percentage of them you hate when it's defined as being the people that you hate. There's no test to determine exactly what it is, but you can sometimes tell by people's behavior. Tolerance, then, is determined by behaving respectfully and with consideration to those you hate.

And perhaps that statement was an oversimplification, but as I understand it, that's essentially the point of the Paradox of Tolerance. If you had to sum that up in a sentence or two, how else would you do it?

If it's defined as the people you hate, then size matters a huge amount. If you only hate and would discriminate against two people, then you're amazingly tolerant.

The paradox of tolerance is not particularly difficult to deal with. You prioritize the preservation of as much tolerance as possible. If someone is trying to reduce the levels of tolerance in the world by a large amount, it's important to fight them, even if it means minor short term intolerance. And even then you tolerate them in all other ways.

The argument was not that they are different, but that they are more collectively minded and put less value in "individual freedom". Totalitarianism seems an obviously bad thing wrt to individual freedom, but if that is not so important, it may not matter as much as we westerners think it should.

> but that they are more collectively minded and put less value in "individual freedom"

Chinese people aren't drones. They don't have a hivemind to tell them what is good for them. Sacrifice for the country might be a thing during Mao's period, but I am not seeing it in nowadays' young generation.

On the contrary, I think Chinese people believe less in the collective good. If the problem isn't your own problem, then it is everyone's problem, then it is no one's problem. That is why in so many situations, government becomes that last resort to figure stuff out.

'The mountains are tall, and the emperor is afar', as the old Chinese sayings goes. The ruthless authoritarianism and primitive freedom co-exist in China's case.

There is pressure to conform, but only because not doing so, there will be pain. 'The bird who extends out its head most gets shot first', as they always say.

Confucianism might be what the world, even China itself thinks about itself, how it is ruled upon. But Fajia (Legalism) is what actually gets executed in real life.

It's hard to believe in the collective good when you haven't achieved basic economic security for yoursef. You see this everywhere - charity begins at home. And even "putting value in individual freedom", in a broadly political sense, is something that requires a sympathetic and collectively-minded outlook.

Well, maybe they're "more collectively minded" because they've been living under totalitarian regimes for millennia. And even if we accept (which I do) that some Western-style society is better, getting there would be hugely nontrivial.

In particular, getting there would arguably involve considerable chaos. And so it's not that hard for those in control to play on people's fears about that. After all, Westerners have tried to impose democracy on China before, and it didn't work out very well.

Back in the 60s, China was on track to be North Korea times 10^4 to 10^6. But Kissinger managed to convince Nixon to intervene in a constructive and noninvasive way. That clearly has worked, so what we need is arguably to stay on that track.

On the other hand, isolating South Africa arguably did hasten the end of Apartheid. And if China undertakes full-on genocide against the Uyghurs, that may be the only moral path. But orders of magnitude more dangerous. And when we add global climate change to the mix, it'll be insane.

It's more collectively minded as many countries ended up with an figurehead emperor who acts as a symbol of the state, giving everyone something to bind themselves to even if they hate their local king.

South Africa really the best example of a 'successful' intervention?

Have there been any truly successful forceful interventions?

It depends on the definition of success for the involved parties. It doesn't always mean full captulation.

I meant more about long-term improved situation.

I suppose that you could claim Germany or Japan as long-term successes. But the costs were immense.

What do you expect to happen when their economy has its version of the great depression or the Japanese lost decades?

That's unlikely to happen unless the PRC loses a major war or becomes much more corrupt. They're ideologically and politically quite capable of re-engineering their financial system so it continues to allocate resources as they see fit, and they're not beholden to a great power with misaligned interests, the way Japan is.

> As westerners

Are the actions of the current Chinese dictatorship praised or at least scene as normal by Koreans, Japanese, or Taiwanese?

No.

The culture of repression, and a hair trigger to stamp out any unfavorable comment on a regime is a sign of bad governance. Where will it end? Ten years ago, it was safe to criticize the actions of the regime, so long as you accepted that the government as a whole legitimate. Now you can no longer criticize the top-level, as its just one man. Will this trickle down till no one can speak ill of the government at all, lest they be seen as speaking ill of its dictator?

Honestly, the few times I've tried to bring it up with Chinese students at USA universities they have all been blasé about it. They have all been, "that's just the way it is."

That could be because they just don't want to talk about it. Or because they are mostly from rich families and so they really don't care. Or only kids from loyal families are allowed to go to school overseas.

Or perhaps their English isn’t good enough or they think type are trying to lecture them?

At least one person I talked to was very fluent in English.

TIP: find a student born and raised in Beijing/Tianjing, they are much more likely to talk about politics. My father’s favorite story was about drinking with the student leader at the night before 89’s event happened.

No one wants to upset a good thing, that being in the United States of America.

I have asked many as well. I believe it is partly cultural pressure to conform, but mostly because they all have family back in China still and care about what happens to them.

I have also heard, but have not been able to verify, that any Chinese student who studies abroad must become a member of the Communist Party.

"Chinese student who studies abroad must become a member of the Communist Party." . The chinese international students in US, have to become member of the Chinese Students Association. The association is a front for the Chinese govt via their Embassy to monitor the students.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/02/14/exclusive-chinese-gover...

> that any Chinese student who studies abroad must become a member of the Communist Party

Not true. Being a Chinese student who studied in the US in the past, I never joined, or was asked to join the Communist Party. In fact, the majority of Chinese students in the US that I know are not Communist Party members. A passport (and a valid visa) is all you need to go abroad.

The key difference is whether or not people in the society are allowed to discuss the incident, or if doing so is heavily censored.

I did not ask them about Tienanmen Square but about censorship in general so it is a little different.

I am a college professor and I think student opposition to freedom of speech is way way way overblown.

What would you expect an overseas US college student to say or not say about Rodney King?

Whatever the individual US student themselves actually thought about Rodney King and all of the social impacts and causation surrounding those terrible events in Los Angeles.

This is in fact the critical difference between totalitarian society and free society.

Totalitarian regime in North Korea seems pretty stable after 70 years. Ancient Egypt was extremely totalitarian regime yet its worst period lasted centuries.

Don't compare 3000BC to internet times.

You're right, once science has advanced to the point where human lifetimes can be arbitrarily extended, totalitarian regimes will never need to experience the trauma of power transfer, and will continue without end forever.

Another factor is surveillance. Government state in first-world countries can spy over every citizen right now with millions of video cameras and cellphones, finding outliers with big data technologies and AI algorithms. So-called terrorists. Third-world countries don't possess those technologies yet, but they are coming and probably will rent software (so first-world countries will have even more data outside of their borders).

I can't imagine how someone would organize protests under real totalitarian control, when every step is recorded and you can't hide. They will be arrested pretty soon. So 21-century will allow totalitarian regimes to thrive, unless they are not friends with closer supercountry, in that case of course they will be overthrown and replaced with loyal ones.

The fall of Ceaușescu or going back further Robespierre being two examples

> My gut feeling is that there will be a day in the future where everything in China is going to boil-over just like any other totalitarian regimes in the past.

I think the 1989 incident was such an event. It almost boiled over. But what happened is that regime learned from its mistakes and it learned to control its temperature better i.e. introduced market economy.

They've sort of made this pact with the people "you don't ask us about what happened in 1989, but in exchange you get to participate in world's capitalist economy".

Another sad realization could be that capitalism and democracy don't really have to coexist. It seemed for a while that democracy would follow after enough prosperity and market economy took over. But it hasn't happened in China. And we might be surprised that capitalism might even work better under a totalitarian regime.

*great people