4 ms·

The West is the outlier here. Most of the world has lived under dictatorships for most of history. China is a millenia-old civilization that has never been a de

• lvs 8y ago
  The West was never a democracy until it suddenly was one. Heads rolled.
  • Zuider 8y ago
    Heads rolled in France, but that lead to the totalitarian Jacobin regime. Across the channel in Britain, democracy had been growing slowly since the signing of the Magna Carta began the process of subjecting power to the rule of law, divesting the monarch of the claim to absolute power and distributing that power among institutions such as parliament.
  • vl 8y ago
    "Never" is an overstatement, since both Rome and Greece had some forms of democracy.
• Symmetry 8y ago
  That's true but most of the people who have lived have been relatively poor and ignorant. Empirically, there seems to be a transition point in development where democracy goes from making a country less stable to making it more stable and I've actually forgotten exactly what the level was but China will be past it soon if it isn't already. I really have to re-read Wars, Guns, and Votes.
  • Faark 8y ago
    > Empirically, there seems to be a transition point in development where democracy goes from making a country less stable to making it more stable Even if that was the case for now (lets say e.g. reading or education made the masses harder to oppress), this doesn't mean other developments cannot outperform those effects in a different direction. Especially social media is a recent invention that seems to put a lot of power into the hands of very few. So far they don't seem to wield that power to drastically shape politics of our societies. At least not intentionally. But keeping it this way will be hard, since they either do something to prevent headlines like "A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military" or have them attract the wrong kind of investor. Actually, the latter is probably impossible to avoid long-term, if the US broadcasting industry is something to go by. The rising political divide in the US is an interesting upcoming case study. I don't see a lot that could revert course, so it will probably end as an anecdote for "less stable". The current US existing for that long is still a remarkable achievement. But we better use the knowledge we gain, since technological progress has made it unacceptable to have our societal systems become unstable every once in a while and needing to be reset violently.
• patcon 8y ago
  Also, fwiw, the west is the one that can't stop it's out-of-control careening toward climate catastrophe. China's handling it much better.
  • YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
    I'm sorry but China shows no sign of reducing emissions: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/09/22/blogs/dotglobcarbchina/dotglobcarbchina-blog480.jpg https://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/09/22/blogs/dotglobcarb... Also, have you been to Beijing? The smog is so dense that sometimes you don't see 50m ahead ... The only thing they're doing is trying to build cheaper electric vehicles.
    • phyrex 8y ago
      I’m in Beijing right now and it’s nowhere as bad as you describe (which is how it was ten years ago). Electric cars and scooters are everywhere. China really seems to be trying to get their environmental shit together, it’s just a big project that takes time
      • pertymcpert 8y ago
        I was there yesterday for a few hours and the air looked terrible. didn’t check the actual numbers, but wow was the air ugly.
        • YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
          It depends heavily on the weather, and on the season. No wind -> worse smog, more coal heating (in the winter) -> also worse smog. It does seem to be improving though: http://img.caixin.com/2018-11-16/1542361119634258.jpg http://img.caixin.com/2018-11-16/1542361119634258.jpg
  • okmokmz 8y ago
    That's completely false
• 07d046 8y ago
  Technically, China was a democracy for a brief period after the Xinhai Revolution at the start of the 20th century. Democracy was also one of the major themes of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. In these decades, China was busy importing Western ideas because they believed that was the key to rejuvenate China. The Communist Party eventually won power in China, but it was only following the Korean War that all hope was lost that China could transition to a democracy. Still, the spectre of democracy remains. The Chinese Communist Party still talks about democracy positively sometimes and the Chinese constitution describes China as a democracy. They do this partly by ignoring what democracy means (the constitution also guarantees "freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration"), and partly by redefining what democracy means. It's Western-style democracy that the CCP treats as an unambiguously bad and dangerous idea.
• okmokmz 8y ago
  >The current regime may fall, but it is not written in the universe that it will progress towards anything resembling a Western democracy. Nowhere in his comment did he say it was. He simply said the situation wold "boil-over"