Quote:
Originally Posted by Itse
Every new Saudi leader in the last 30 years has also been a "moderate reformer" in western media. Because the western media is gullible (and also because western media likes to think that western educated people would be moderate).
As for China, in the nineties it was a widely accepted "truism" that capitalism and democracy are inseparable, so it was a very genuine belief among most countries leaderships that introducing more capitalism to China (and Russia and other autocratic former soviet states) would automatically lead to advancements in democracy. This was a major part of "the end of history" that was presumed to be happening after the collapse of the soviet block, and a central part of the Clinton era optimism.
Of course now we all know (something that leftists have been saying all along) that capitalism and dictatorships actually go together quite beautifully, and instead of capitalism bringing democracy to the east it's played a notable part in eroding democracies in the west.
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The rise of a middle class does always bring greater democracy.....eventually, in 50 or a 100 years assuming it maintains its capitalist path China will be more democratic than it is now, it is now far more democratic than it was in 1965 but the pathway that took the west hundreds of years, that the US has only begrudgingly entered into itself in my lifetime and still is far from democratic for vast swathes of its coloured population, well China will take a bit longer than 3 or 4 decades