Yes, good times' correlation with a ruler may be total coincidence. But then again, it may not. You're strongly suggesting that the correlation is almost certai

Yes, good times' correlation with a ruler may be total coincidence. But then again, it may not. You're strongly suggesting that the correlation is almost certainly total coincidence. But in this case, it's easily refuted by looking at data. India and the PRC started at roughly the same time, same population and same GDP. (Actually PRC had it worse than India, GDP- and infrastructure-wise.) Now compare them today. Chinese are not inherently smarter than Indians. Heck, look at emerging democracies in the past 30 years. Which ones have grown like China and have been able to give their citizen good lives? Not one. If you look at South Korea and Taiwan, then you see that most of their growth and development came during a time when they heavily relied on industrial policy — the same strategy that China today employs. Thus, there is a strong case to be made that China's success is for a significant part contributed by its government. To believe otherwise and ignore the data is to just cling onto the hope that the CCP should not have any legitimacy. Regarding blaming Chinese people for being "bombarded with misinformation": so say so is to remove Chinese people's agency. We aren't mindless drones, we can have a legitimate opinion that's different from yours, for legitimate reasons. Furthermore, there is a power problem here. If you say that you blame the Chinese people, then you leave people like me no choice but to become more supportive of the CCP. Because foreign actors won't act in the best interest of China: they claim they do ("freedom", "democracy", etc) but at the end of the day we empirically observe that the actions that foreign governments take, harm not only the Chinese state and the CCP, but also regular Chinese people. Despite all its faults, CCP is the only party that actually stands up for the interests of the Chinese civilization. Disclaimer: I make no comments about Russia. Just China.