I've never understood then why the Chinese are against democracy. If everyone is happy and can't imagine a better government wouldn't they just elect the CCP every time?
As an American, I sometimes wonder if it is too dogmatic to treat democracy as the end all be all of governments.
As I understand it, democracy refers to a heuristic for solving the problem of reaching consensus in a decision making scenario in a system of multiple agents each having a differing opinion. In this heuristic, every agent has the right to vote on an issue in order to influence the consensus. (America is a republic so we vote on other agents to do the voting on our behalf rather than the issues themselves.)
Computer scientists can come up with all sorts of different ways of tackling the consensus problem. For example, one strategy is to choose the agents with the most information about the system (most educated) and treat their opinions as more important when reaching consensus. (As society advances and modeling societal problems become more sophisticated, solutions may require people with increasingly more domain knowledge.)
Although variations of such strategies are probably not democracies, I don't think they are necessarily inferior, if as a heuristic when tried out, are actually effective.
If there's a formal proof that democracy is, in fact, the best government, I'm open to hearing it though.
When people say they want democracy, don't they often mean more specifically that they want rule of law / due process? Is it not possible to have both a government that have characteristics that make it authoritarian / not democratic but also have rule of law?
I would love to discuss these questions, starting with ”is consensus or effect what we’re really measuring?” or ”if the agents get to decide how they’re evaluates, what effect does that have?” but it really has very little to do with the fact that if everyone loves the CCP and they are doing a great job, democracy could be introduced without any real hassle.
Maybe not all, but Chinese people want democracy. There's one case of a village that elected their own leaders in China. See Hong Kong, Tienanmen Square Massacre, Wukan Democracy experiment (Mainland Chinese) or Taiwan (ROC/CCP say Taiwan is part of China).
But you will find that CCP insists on having the last say. Imagine electing Trump and Walmart CEO says we won't support the plan to build USA-Mexico wall. Trump says ok.
Yeah, I was a bit generalizing in my comment and could've phrased it better. What I meant to say was that I don't understand how so many Chinese people reconcile the idea that the CCP enjoys nation wide support with the perspective that democracy and checks an balances would make China worse. If everything's awesome and just what the people want the CCP would just get legitimacy not just domestically but also in the International community.
If a country is not ready for Democracy with the necessary amount of development/safeguards, this can be a disaster.
Like installing an internet connected Windows XP on your network with no updates, it introduces tremendous attack vectors that established actors/economies (UK, France, US, Germany) will be all to happy to exploit.
If some new party comes and aims at the weak spots of CCP like censorship etc...etc... And promises that we'll keep economy as fast as CCP does minus the personal freedom restrictions. People will vote for them.
And new party might even attempt this and take economy several years back.
Democracy will include lots of selling hopes and setbacks...it takes time to learn new lessons for public
But democracy would also open up new ides to run the country that would create an even stronger economy. After all, it was the CCP ceding control ocer much of the economy that laid the ground work for the Chinese economic boom, for most of the CCP’s history it has failed miserably at its job and set China back by decades. There’s no reason to believe it has found the optimal solution now.
Plus, we could maybe see a fairer distribution of wealth and prosperity. Wealth disparity is a very big problem in China.
