Your response is a case in point. Your views on "stakeholders", your belief in "representative democracy", and your faith in the wisdom of the People are fully in line with the progressive orthodoxy that is the bedrock of Western public education. That doesn't necessarily make your views wrong, but it's unlikely that you were reasoned into them from a blank slate. It's more likely you came to them after a lifetime of exposure to a press and public educational system that almost uniformly espouses such views.

As a thought experiment, consider what a hoplite educated in a Spartan agoge would think of your views. What about an aristocrat educated in Antonine Rome, or in France under Louis XIV? Would they share your sanguine views on the wisdom of the People? If not, why not? How confident are you that you are right and they are wrong, and what is the basis of that confidence?

None of this is a defense of current Chinese government policy. My point is that using official education for brainwashing and political indoctrination is par for the course in a country founded on the principle of popular sovereignty. One consequence of this is that virtually every educated Westerner, including most readers of Hacker News and the New York Times, has been exposed to the same sort of brainwashing and political indoctrination decried by the protesters in the OP. One effect of this is a reflexive support of popular movements of all sorts without an appreciation of the potential costs of that support.

Louis XIV might even have been sanguine, but his descendant Louis XVI would know what I mean.

You are fighting a losing battle here I think but it is a reasonable question. In political studies folks often use economic success as a proxy for evaluating the quality of governance, by that analysis the US system would score highly. and African feudalism would score poorly. However such discussions are fraught with conditions, such as what are the natural resources available? What are the hindrances? China makes an interesting case because its economic growth under strict communism (Mao's model) was quite poor, whereas its economic growth under a more capitalist system (Den Xioping's model) has done much better. But its also perfectly valid to wonder if economics is a good proxy. What about life expectancy? happiness ? hunger?

Ultimately though you are going to run into debating philosophy and that makes for wonderful rhetoric but few conclusions.

Aren't all those other factors pretty strongly correlated with economic success? "Happiness" is obviously slippery and hard to measure, but to the extent it's not dependent on the individual's choices, it depends a lot on physical/emotional/economic comfort. And money works pretty well for getting medicine and food.

Yes, they correlate, although the causal linkages are subject to debate. It is is also one of tenets of American politics sort of "If you're so good how come the economy has tanked while you were driving?" this encompasses both the evaluation criteria and the assumption of causality.

Marcus Aurelius once remarked that "the object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

>Not really. For large amounts of people to get worked up enough about a proposed government policy to bother protesting in public, it usually means the proposed policy is really bad. People don't get off their butts otherwise.

The "large amounts" can be a figure media put out of their asses.

Take Putin, as a case in point. He has the majority vote by a large margin, the common people love him, but in western media he is portrayed as a dictator.

E.g they take some pro-westernization demonstrations of 10,000 people and blow them out of all proportions. The equivalent would be to use the "Occupy Wall Street" footage as proof that the majority of Americans are against their leadership and the country is a dictatorship.

It doesn't hurt that the minority of Russians that americans find closer to them and their views are anti-Putin. For them, those people (bloggers, tech-geeks, young westernised people etc) represent what most Russians want, when in reality they represent a small minority.