The biggest mistake western democracies have made is to trade with dictatorships. Enriching them has not encouraged them to become progressive, it has only made them more powerful. We have sown the seeds of our own destruction through our complicity.
Historians would point toward a pressure toward democratization of states that occurs as the middle class gains more power. Countries like France and Britain didn't suddenly decide on "parliamentary democracy" as a model out of nowhere; they developed a parliament first, when they were still monarchies, and then the parliament suppressed the monarch. The second estate (nobility) of these countries, which previously f…
Historians didn't have anything to do with all the decisions that were made by politicians making deals with China. It was the financial industry and the politicians they finance who came up with bullshit PR to convince the public opinion that China would magically become a democracy if the west started free trade with China. No historian was ever consulted unless it was to give credit to that PR campaign.
Now did a significant part of the chinese population become wealthier as the result? Yes, it doesn't change the fact that China was, is and will be a bloody dictatorship, for a long time, by western standards.
The west needed to outsource slavery for economic purposes, as always, the west got them slaves.