Legitimacy comes from having been elected. An unelected Government is, as they say, just a group of thugs who just happen to be in control of a capital city. W

Legitimacy comes from having been elected. An unelected Government is, as they say, just a group of thugs who just happen to be in control of a capital city. Within that definition there’s certainly some ambiguity as to what counts as a “good enough” election to confer legitimacy. Edge cases would be things like Singapore, Russia or Hitler’s Germany... but Communist China is not close to an edge case.