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?

> can't imagine a better government

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.

And when is a country ready for democracy? Why was Taiwan ready for democracy decades ago but Shanghai is not?

No because "hope for better always exists".

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.

CCP above all care about their own power then comes China's interest.

I simply posted why they might not want democracy. As they might fear about losing power.

If we assume democracy does good, but it still makes CCP lose power then it's not good for CCP and they'll not want it.

If democracy will actually be good or bad, that's open discussion. But that's not point of my comment.

It's difficult, but ironically the real enemy of every large developing nation is its own populism/chauvinism.

When the young ruling elite encounters a crisis, a real problem, often they see that doing it in a transparent and equitable way would only serve as gunpowder for their detractors. Hence the very fast descent into totalitarianism.

And it's no wonder the real crisis of every regime is not some natural disaster, or economic collapse... no, in large nation states the game is entirely about the meta level, the power, and how to keep it, how to distribute it. Naturally this leads to the aforementioned populism/nationalism/etc.

I don't think it is correct. Chinese people truly are in a support of China's leaders and China's policies, just like Soviet people were in support of the Soviet policies.

Had it not been the case, there would have been no government capable of stopping the rebellion: if one solider can control a 100 citizens (via say bullets) then in order to control 1.3 billion, China would need to give bullets to 130 million people so if 10% of them switch sides the other side gets 13 million people with bullets who aren't friendly to the party line.

That's exactly how the USSR fell. Population stopped supporting the government.

Yes it's true. Chinese government actually learned a lot from the Soviet government so that it survived.

Plus Soviet was actually brought down by many of the high officials themselves.

Uh...you probably don’t know that Chineses have a nickname for the Russian ethnic group: the race of true fighters(战斗种族). On the other hand, Han Chinese is especially bad at rebellion, being conquered multiple times from the north in the history

If we looked at the past though, the Han Chinese did rebel many times, both agains conquering (e.g. the Yuan and Qing) and native dynasties and these rebellions were often successful.

When you think about it, even the current CCP regime started as a rebel army.

Right I should add that those rebellions would happen when the economy is extremely bad and the living condition is intolerable.

Authoritarianism breeds corruption. When the next scandal hits, and the corruption is revealed, maybe the citizens will revolt (again) against the CCP.

Nah, it doesn't work that way. It never did.

In feudal times ther were many instances of folks from higher classes abusing the folks from the lower ones. Nothing really happened, some isolated instances of retribution happened, and that was it.

Scandals/abuses worked the same way in the USSR. The very worst offenders eventually got shifted around the system. (source: https://www.libri.hu/konyv/majtenyi_gyorgy.kommunista-kiskir... alas no English translation, but there are probably similar surveys of historically documented real stories about how the men of the ruling party were somehow always more powerful than the official propaganda stated how equal everyone is)