To be fair to the tankies (I know, I know), China’s dictatorship has pulled a lot of people out of poverty. It doesn’t make their wrongs ok, and it doesn’t make them communists, but it does explain why people desperate to see a liberatory alternative to capitalism see China as a possibility (through motivated reasoning and a squint).
China still has drastic poverty. Don’t buy the party line. I’ve had friends who lived in China. You have the wealthy and the extreme poor. It isn’t a place I’d want to emulate. To me it’s very dystopian. People being paid slave wages, working 18 hours a day and living in dorms. No thank you.
Yeah, and you know what country with identical cultural background grew even more economically over the same time frame while also becoming the most democratic and arguably most socially progressive country in Asia? Taiwan.
They started out as a highly impoverished dictatorship, now they’re a high-income country (significantly wealthier per-capita than China), are the only country in Asia where gay marriage has been legalized, and rank as one of the healthiest democracies in the world.
I’m positive they have issues and inequality and poverty still (every country does), but they kinda show that democracy is a fundamentally better system than autocracy.
A good article about how autocracies are fundamentally flawed systems: The Myth of the Effective Dictator
Or a non-paywall link here
