Are those numbers from China?

Is there a reason to trust them if so, considering they would be coming from a brutal, authoritarian dictator?

I wouldn’t doubt that they are roughly accurate.

The question is is the growth worth the pound of flesh the CCP takes as its right in return for that growth and social stability?

Another fair question is could it not have been achieved through a more humane system of governance?

What is interesting to me is that these questions never arise of eg. South Korea.

You’ve just met with cognitive dissonance

Because the CCP’s (more specifically Xi Jinping’s) entire thesis is that democracies are incapable of producing good outcomes.

A lot of the move towards authoritarianism that we’ve been seeing in the world has been driven by the success of the “China model”.

If India is successful to a similar degree as China, that shatters this belief, especially since there are very significant questions about the Chinese economy and how stable it is. A lot of the numbers appear to be made up in a way India simply cannot do.

And if Democracies can achieve success, Chinese citizens themselves may consider it as the better alternative as it might indicate that China’s economic success was less the result of the CCP and more because the Chinese government chose to move towards a Western capitalist economic system a couple of decades before India.

I’m curious to see a source that says the modern CCP states that democracy cannot succeed in general.

The CCP stance is that democracy wouldn’t work for China. Whether that’s actually true or not is debatable of course.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-politics-xi-idUSBRE...

Their stance relies mostly on the same tired canards that India disproves; that an uneducated populace, rural areas, etc are hindrances. They are, but they're not ones that Communism/Authoritarianism solves - And India has some authoritarian properties, too.

The 2016 Indian banknote demonetisation is perfect example of how a somewhat democratic state can pull off large scale action that China refutes as a possibility. Was it pretty? Was it effective? Who knows. What matters in this argument is that it's the kind of corruption fighting mechanism that China likes to cite as the domain of their heavenly mandate and not possible for democracies.

Again, China can keep yelling that their way is the only way for China, but there does need to be a little more supporting basis than that.

> Again, China can keep yelling that their way is the only way for China, but there does need to be a little more supporting basis than that.

Says who?

Running a society is hard. You can't simply compare the reality against a hypothetical better outcome that was guaranteed to happen under democracy, even ignoring the claim (at best contentious) that India has done better than China for the last couple decades.

An equally a propos comparison would be the Soviet Union and its attempt at a transition to democracy. Life spans and material wellbeing collapsed, and even their political system ultimately backslid, to something as bad as the USSR. You can say that they just did democracy wrong--which they certainly did--but that doesn't solve the core issue that getting democracy right is a really hard problem. If the CCP had committed to democratic reforms under Deng, maybe it would have worked out better; but it also might have created turmoil and mass death, as attempts at democracy did in the USSR. And if the latter happened, rubbernecking Westerners would just say "well China did democracy wrong"; democracy never fails, it can only be failed. It's easy to call for from afar, but when your society's well-being is on the line, it's a much scarier risk to take for abstract benefits.

The official CCP stance is that China is democratic. Here's the literal party line:

Democracy is a common value of humanity and an ideal that has always been cherished by the Communist Party of China and the Chinese people.

http://www.news.cn/english/2021-12/05/c_1310352606.htm

Yes, that’s what Xi says in my link as well, but most westerners do not consider single party democracy to be legitimate.

Ya, so they just need to add another party to be considered as such

… but India isn’t successful on the same scale as China. India’s middle class is not secure nor are successive generations guaranteed to remain middle class. That wealth is just not there.

India’s real middle class is just one financial disaster away from poverty. China on the other hand has been immensely successful at lifting millions out of poverty and securing them firmly in the middle class.

Also, if you think India cannot and does not make up numbers, you are completely wrong. See most recently their COVID numbers. See in the past their economic data that was treated at par with garbage by the global community.

You could say the same for any nation though. Right now, I would say that the Western middle class is not secure either, particularly in Europe, and just one disaster away from poverty. Young families are priced out of starter homes and there is increasing uncertainty.

We don't know what is the extent of the real estate bad loan crisis in China. But if the protests surrounding it are telling, then I would say that the Chinese middle class are already in a financial disaster. Couple that with the increasing anti-globalization from the West, and China's middle class certainly ends up being in a very bad position.

this is a flawed understanding and mischaracterises the situation. Europe’s middle class will be broke if they lose all their money. They still have institutional supports and community to fall back on. This is as true in the poorer european countries as it is in the richer ones. Not being able to afford a home is not in the same ballpark as not being able to eat.

India’s middle class will fall into poverty if they lose their money. the critical difference is that the indian middle class is without government or societal support to help them out of poverty.

And what if everyone in Europe is broke? The government can magically cook up money from thin air right? Those taxes will pay for themselves right?

In India, around 3% of the population pays income tax because the rest are under the tax bracket. Yet somehow the government manages to have public schools and hospitals. During covid, when students and children in the UK were starving, India was feeding 200 million people out of the government's pockets.

Its funny seeing people who have the faintest idea of Indian ground realities make sweeping generalizations about a country of 1.5b people.

Linked article is roughly double the time frame referenced for India. Its in the world's largest democracy. Benevolent dictatorships work for as long ad the dictator(s) remains Benevolent.

I think the idea is we can have both democracy and paradigm shifting changes in a very short time span that hasn’t really been proven out recently.

This is like intentionally shipping bugs into production so you can be the hero and fix them. Why did China have to lift 800M people out of poverty in the first place? Congratulations to the Chinese gov on decreasing the way they treat their populace like farm animals?

The century of humiliation probably is the reason why.

To use the same analogy is like someone hacked their system and placed a bug in production.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation