Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is democracy the only acceptable endgame? I worry we're mixing up ends and means. Democracy is a means, and "good government" is the end. In the last few decades, the overall Chinese population has seen dramatic upticks on all sorts of quality-of-life measurements. It doesn't look like an obvious kleptocracy. The surveys we have, regardless of how much it can be claimed they're cooked, indicate the public is broadly…
> Is democracy the only acceptable endgame? In my opinion, yes. Any other system of government means that you're being governed without consent and without a means to remove those in power without violence. In short, any regime without a democratic mandate is an illegitimate dictatorship. No mater how enlightened it claims to be.
It requires either a lot of good faith by participants (most participants actually striving for the public good, and voters being able to disagree with an opponent, but still respectfully accept defeat) or systemic guardrails to effectively enforce good-faith style behaviour.
Even with those guidelines in place, some countries are going to have a hard time with the nuts and bolts (How do you safely deliver ballots and count votes with an active insurgency? How do you campaign when only 10% of voters can read? How do you avoid a major ethnic/religious schism just being re-processed through the electoral system?)
It's an aspirational goal, to be sure, but we can also respect that other systems are working reasonably well for some audiences, and in some cases might work better than a "more legitimate" democracy.