> but I also believe that the Western policy of hoping that welcoming in China would lead to greater democratic freedoms was one of arrogance.

I'd probably go with 'naivety' or 'over-optimism' rather than arrogance.

I guess it depends on whether one thinks that democracy and freedom are good things as such. They are not necessarily universal values, even if many in the West tend to think so.

The real utility of democracy isn't really the people getting a say, despite the propaganda on the side of the tin. The real utility of democracy is that it enables a mechanism for bloodless revolution, by essentially hosting them periodically instead of letting the pressures build up for years and decades until the whole thing explodes in a violent, civilization-damaging orgy of blood and destruction. It gives a mechanism for factions to win today, and know cleanly that they won, and the losing factions to know that they lost today, but there is no need to resort to active violence because they will have another chance in 2/4/6 years, and in the meantime, are best off using words rather than war. These are the key characteristics that needs to be kept intact. The people voting is merely the only mechanism that I am aware of that has the ability to accomplish these goals; it utilizes the sheer inertial mass of the entire populace as a guarantee of the next vote occurring and as a dampener on excessively excited governments. (For this, the propaganda that Democracy is all about the people getting a say is useful, because it makes the population more likely to get properly feisty if you try to take it from them.) Personally I think there are some other possibilities, though it isn't clear to me they can function under the Westphalian definition of countries and sovereignty.

Looking at China's past decade or so... I'm getting the sense that they're going to be on the usual authoritarian trajectory of countries that decide the democracy isn't for them. Initially it can work better, because democracies are always messy, especially superficially messy in the ways that elites find oh-so-distasteful. But the thing is, while democracies are always about the same level of messy, the authoritarian regimes build up a lot of stress in the system which they hide in various places until they can hide no more, and one day the whole thing simultaneously explodes and implodes and is, on the whole, a great deal more messy than the ever-so-distasteful democracy would have been. Is the messiness of democracy the fault of the governance mechanism, or a reflection of the underlying messiness that exists regardless?

Is democracy good as such? That's a question for personal values. Would democracy be better for China in the next, say, 20 years than its current path? Probably, by any metric you choose. For all of its disadvantages on a day-to-day basis, in a 21st century world democracy really does have some significant long-term advantages, regardless of your local ideology, as long as you like, say, being alive, not fighting civil wars, that sort of thing.

I think of it in the following analogy. Democracy is continuous garbage collection. It is messy and inefficient, sometimes unpredictable for the efficiency nuts. Authoritarianism is manually-managed pointer references. Efficient and very predictable at first. Once the complexity gradient rises above a certain level though...

This is an analogy that only someone on Hackernews would even attempt.

Democracy is complicated (we have a complicated democracy because simple democracy doesn't reflect _our_ values, for instance), but freedom? Maybe at-any-costs freedom isn't universal, but freedom generically is. It is tied so deeply into human dignity you might be imagining Chinese culture poorly if you think it's a bad match.

Also, I live in Taiwan, so with a data point of 1, I'm pretty sure freedom and democracy are a really good match for Chinese culture (probably a better match than American culture? hard to say). It works well here. But that's just my two cents. [edit: it sure as hell works better than the white terror]

> I'm pretty sure freedom and democracy are a really good match for Chinese culture (probably a better match than American culture? hard to say). It works well here. But that's just my two cents.

Would you care to elaborate on your point that "freedom and democracy are a really good match for Chinese culture"? I ask because that directly contradicts one of the points that the CCP (probably Self-servingly) hammers on. It would nice to get other perspectives on that.

I'm no expert, I'm not Taiwanese, and I haven't been to mainland China (though I've been to Hong Kong a couple times, which seems pretty similar to Taipei).

It is an on-the-ground feeling. There is a calm chaos here that reflects the "there are basic rules, but beyond that, everybody carves out a slice of how they think they can be useful" spirit WAY better than America (where everything is pre-apportioned, indoors, with permits, etc.).

I also feel that intergenerational households and stronger community ties lead to better group decision making, which America is having some trouble with. People here have actual hometowns. They care about their local community in a way I've literally not seen a single time in America. Putting aside individual elections or politicians, this helps build a sense of public service, not just horsetrading elections (your local DA isn't setting policy on anything in their party platform, but people in America still want party info so they can try and trade for a policy they want).

All of this is a guess, obviously, and I suppose lots of places are like Taipei.

It's also worth pointing out that the KMT probably made similar statements, about how virtuous martial law was, and how the people didn't want the changes, and western allies couldn't possibly get what they wanted without oppression. Turns out they were wrong. People with power like power, that's true every single square meter of the globe.

For those wondering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)

But we don't want freedom and democracy because of some weird tradition, we want it because tyrants are miserable to live under (along with their tyrannical regimes). They are a practical device for mantaining human health and keeping rubber hoses off people's backs. That's not the "western way," it's game theory.

Barring short 1-2 generational periods, increased personal and political freedom causes greater economic outcomes by country. Consolidating power generally stagnates an economy, and when it doesn't because of good leaders allowing selective personal freedom, that is an unstable state - leaders change.

I always thought freedom is kinda a universal value nowadays.

> and to believe that other cultures are simply going to happily go along with that logic in the long run seems foolish

This framing is problematic. It's not other "cultures" that are resistive to the idea of liberalism and democratic ideals, it's the despots that lead and control those governments that are resistant. How many non Western cultures have thrived under democracies with individual liberties? Japan, a country with a culture that cares little about individualism is one of the most prosperous nations ever.

I am not arguing democratic ideals are bad. Obviously these norms and standards can be introduced to any culture and assimilated over time. What I am arguing is that the method that seems to have been used to get people to accept them doesn't work, was never going to work, but mostly that forcing the construction of certain legal/cultural rights onto groups as part of some international framework was bound to have issues. It has been done in a very sort of, "To join our club, you have to believe that this thing we made up is a universal truth."

As an example, the concept of authors' rights is something that is enforced through the Berne Convention and the original signatories in 1887 were shockingly all Western (or Westernized) nations. Acceptance of it is a WTO membership requirement. The existence of authors' rights is not a thing in some cultures and it is orthogonal to democratic values, but in order to play ball in the global arena, you have to agree that it is a thing.