1: If so many people are ok with it, then why not take a vote? If they are ok with it, they will vote for the current government. If they are not ok, then this argument is false and the current government should be voted out of office. Either way, a vote is good for China.

2: If the citizens are ok with it, then why does the government have to censor criticism and non-government ideas, run massive propaganda operations on their own citizens, jail dissenters, and oppress Tibet and Xinjiang? How do you know if the citizens are ok with it?

3: Parts of China that do have democracy and human rights, Taiwan and Hong Kong, seem to like those things very much - it's not a popular idea in those regions, or even an idea at all, to trade in democracy and human rights for the mainland's political system; no Taiwanese candidate makes that pitch to the voters! Also, people in Taiwan and Hong Kong are far more prosperous per capita than those on the mainland (I'm excluding Hong Kong from the "mainland" in this case.)

> certain freedom tradeoffs vs. improvements in other areas of quality of life.

It's not a tradeoff, it's just a needless sacrifice. All the wealthiest, most secure nations it the world have democracy and human rights. It's not a Western thing; that includes the wealthiest regions of China, Japan, South Korea, etc. What is the Communist dictatorship providing in this tradeoff?

> Its not an issue that you can easily simplify

'It's complicated' is not an answer, it's the avoidance of one.

I think the correlation between democracy and prosperity is indicative of causation in the opposite direction: citizens of prosperous countries want a say in matters that affect them, and they have the time on their hands to campaign for their causes. Many countries have only become democratic when their economies were already prospering, e.g. South Korea, which was a military dictatorship for much of its initial growth.

I also don't think that democracy is the best way to provide stability, since the election cycle tends to create uncertainty on relatively short timescales. How are you going to build a business if the electorate might decide in a few years that they want to make it illegal, or impose stricter regulations, or demand higher taxes? For maximum stability, an autocracy with a slow but predictable bureaucracy would be much better. Of course, if that means your slow but predictable death, it becomes the much worse option, but few people seem to be concerned about that in China.

See my original post, above. The Chinese government clearly is concerned that many people in China are concerned about it.

> I also don't think that democracy is the best way to provide stability, since the election cycle tends to create uncertainty on relatively short timescales. How are you going to build a business if the electorate might decide in a few years that they want to make it illegal, or impose stricter regulations, or demand higher taxes?

That's not how democracies work; they don't elect kings and queens, who can arbitrarily change laws. They elect officials to a wide variety of roles, all responsible to the electorate, who must agree on changes through legal processes. In the U.S., a majority of the House, of the Senate (and sometimes 60% of the Senate), and the President must all agree on a new law. Also, the law must pass muster in the courts, and be legal under the Constitution. Also, voters get a powerful say in what the laws are. If you don't like a proposed or actual law, you can speak up, build support, and influence the outcome - it happens all the time. Finally, the federal government's power is limited to federal issues; states and localities override federal policies or create their own policies all the time. You can see the current U.S. president's lack of success in his legislative agenda as an example of how democracies work.

In an autocracy, one person can arbitrarily change whatever they want - they are not subject to other laws, a constitution, representative legislative bodies, electorates, or any of those other influences.

And the outcomes are clear: All the most stable countries are democracies, and even when they were much poorer than today (such as the U.S. in the 18th century).

In your explanation of the way the US political system provides stability, the important factor is not that bureaucrats are elected, but that their process is slow. It would be equally stable if they were appointed by birthright or any other undemocratic process.

That voters get input into the legislative process is of course a good thing for them in aggregate, but the progress it creates diminishes stability. You can't just keep running your business the same way when the legal environment keeps changing.

Worse, the number of people who get input means that the outcome will be very uncertain. Maybe the law fails to gather support, or it is passed but later ruled unconstitutional, or it is amended after the next election cycle. You have to account for all of these possibilities. Things would be much more stable if you knew far in advance what will happen.

You have convinced me that a single person being able to influence everything might not be very stable either, depending on how fast that individual changes their mind. I now think that a large body of decision makers, appointed for life by any process (be it democratic, autocratic or random) requiring a large quorum of agreement for any decision, would be the most stable system.

If you really want to argue that democracy causes stability, your last sentence should have been: "All democracies are stable countries ...". But I'm not sure you could really argue that, considering the number of democracies who went through very unstable periods in their history. (E.g. civil war in the US.)

But whatever your theories, the data is that democracies do have the most stable and predictable business and legal environments, and more so than China where instability and lack of rule of law is a complaint of businesses, especially foreign ones. Almost all the world's leading businesses are based in democracies; the vast majority of business is done in democracies. Those monarchies that ran the world for millennia didn't perform so well.

It's not just predictability either; corruption is a huge problem. In places with lifetime appointments, what happens to corrupt leaders? They can't be voted out, and lacking the rule of law and separation of powers, they will not be investigated and tried (unless a more powerful leader causes them to be). And why should we think that lifetime appointees will care at all about the voters? The lesson is, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Countries without democracies, in fact, stagnate (such as China until the encounter with the West in the 19th century and again under the Communists (compare w/ Taiwan and Hong Kong), the USSR, N. Korea (compare with S. Korea) and many, many more). Also, by not giving citizens a forceful voice, they ignore and overlook citizens' interests, leaving serious issues unaddressed. Even the well-intentioned cannot centrally plan politics any better than they can centrally plan economics - nobody knows enough to understand and address the needs of hundreds of millions.

Finally, one reason democracies have more prosperity is that they are more dynamic. In autocracies, economic success tends to depend much more on access to those in power. The government will never allow a SpaceX to challenge the favorites of the powerful, Boeing and NASA; or allow Microsoft and Compaq to take down IBM; the Internet to take down the telecomm system (at least not until it was proven to be a necessity in the West), etc. It's because the autocrats have no reason to allow a challenge to their own power and every reason to prevent it.

I'm afraid this debate was settled long ago, around 1776 in the U.S., and monarchy and autocracy clearly lost.

However, I find it interesting that you mention the examples of PRC vs. ROC and North vs. South Korea as autocracy vs. democracy. In fact, after World War II, all four of them were military dictatorships/one-party states, none of them particularly inclined towards democracy. The only difference was their alliance to either the USSR (PRC and NK) or the US (ROC and SK). This helped ROC and SK to develop their economies (still under autocratic rule) and likely contributed to their eventual transition to democracy (while keeping their economic growth).

That would seem to indicate that economic development leads to democracy, and not the other way around. I tried to make this point in my previous comments, but you did not address it. I'd like to know what you think about that.

That's not what I said. I said autocracies stagnate; wealthy democracies are the most dynamic, innovative economies, in business, technology, science, culture and everything else. That's where the Internet, web, Facebook, the startup business model, financial engineering, bitcoin, globalization, open source, rock'n'roll, hip hop, electronic dance music, personal computers and smartphones, modern 'deep learning' AI, and almost any other innovation you can name comes from. It's where science, capitalism, democracy, universal human rights, and much more came from.