Do you think democracy can actually work in China?

[angus]

The mainstream view in North America is to split Europe in two: West and East, corresponding on which side they were during Cold War.

In the long run, that was only a short-lived phenomenon.  American articles written prior to about 1948 and after about 1992 referenced a "Central" Europe.  I would assume that a similar trend holds for Swedes and Russians.  Also, Poland has long had a democratic tradition.

Anyway, I voted for the second option, but that's not quite it either.  I think democracy might work there, but why in the hell would they want it?  Most Chinese I talk to don't seem to value it, and they certainly have gotten on very well for 40 centuries without it.  China is usually the richest nation in the world.  It was sixteen hundred years ago, it was six hundred years ago, and it is likely to be again within my lifetime the nation with the largest aggregate gdp.  At the height of the Roman Empire, under Marcus Aurelius circa AD180, then Han and Roman empires had roughly the same number of square miles and the same number of peoples.  Rome fell apart; the Han kept it together.  The largest city in the world is in China.  The most populous nation is China.  The language which has more native speakers than any other is China.  They are about as successful a nation as I can imagine.  The country that invented democracy, on the other hand, can't seem to get its head out of its ass.  It still boggles the mind that we have so many threads encouraging Western democracy in such a nation as China.

[angus]

We have had a number of china/democracy threads and it is invariably the tendency of this forum to overrate democracy, or at least to underrate its alternatives.  There are probably different ways to read the question, but I think from the chinese point of view all democracy is liberal democracy.  Certainly during the Cultural Revolution democracy was considered Western by virtue of its history.  In any case I merely made the implicit explicit.  

As for freedom, Janis Joplin called it another word for "nothin' left to lose."  Whether or not they have tasted it, I'm sure that China doesn't want to be India.  

Also, we cannot say for certain that the air quality would be any better in a democracy.  In fact, it could be far worse.  Beijing cleaned up as much as it did and as quick as it did for the olympics precisely because they don't have to put up with democracy.  We cannot know whether the Three Gorges dam would have been built if the millions of people who were displaced from their ancestral homelands by rising waters had any input in the decision, but it probably would not have been built as quickly and as efficiently.

Like I said, I voted yes, because I think it "can work" with democracy, but I am not sure it would work quite as well as it does without it.  I don't think you should underestimate the importance of utility value and economic indicators.  Justice and fairness don't put food on the table, and the Chinese have had a much longer time to think about what is important and what isn't than any other extant society.  Therefore, you also should not underestimate the importance of history.