China's Xinjiang surveillance is the dystopian future nobody wants

It is so simple because I'm not talking about US people and what they like. Not everybody in a country likes the same things... that does seem like too much simplification btw.

I'm talking about flaws that make a political system a tyranny. And they're the same for every country as History has repeteadly shown.

there could very well something special with China as a country, and it's constitution of people's, history, antagonisms, etc, that a change would unleash hell.

It's difficult, but by no means impossible to make a peaceful transition from dictatorships to democracy. There are many examples: Spain, Portugal, many South American countries, East Europe... most likely cause of hell unleashing is nothing cultural or historic, but money.

The West has been externalizing manufactures to China the same way we've been buying oil from Saudi Arabia. Those regimes are now armored with tons of money from any pressure to open.

Russia risked that chaos, but it had little choice: the USSR was a complete economic disaster. If China today was as bad economically as the USSR in 1985, a big part of my argument would disappear.

In some limited sense, I might even say that the Chinese economy today with the old regime is more promising than the Russian economy today after all the changes. And even if I'm wrong on that, still the Chinese economy is at least decent. So the people in China have a lot more to lose from chaos than the people in the USSR did.

Another thing. You're saying Russia is in a better state today than 30 years ago. Yes, but Russia is governed by a strongman, who doesn't allow much political dissent. Are you sure that without him Russia wouldn't be in chaos?

And if you think that what is going on in Russia is an acceptable compromise, then why would you be uncomfortable with the Chinese government? The difference is not that great.

By the way, authoritarian governments had been around for millennia before fascism was even a thing. I don't see why you would equate the two.

Who invented democracy? Who were its earliest proponents, and later 'rediscoverers' and adopters during the late Enlightenment? Does not the culture and the government co-evolve with one another over time, such that they form a single functioning unit?

On the contrary, it is the idea that the formal system of government can be completely shorn of the context of the society and the cultural mores from which they arise that is naive.

The failure of the majority of states outside of the West to be democracies in actual fact even when they have the formal process of elections should demonstrate that simply imposing a foreign system of rule on a nation that has no experience with it is highly unwise. How well have the democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan turned out?

I find it pretty surprising that you speak with such certainty and conviction about Western liberal democracy when the

I'll leave you with this quote from Aristotle, who certainly believed there was a relationship between the people and the form of governance they could attain:

"The nations inhabiting the cold places and those of Europe are full of spirit but somewhat deficient in intelligence and skill, so that they continue comparatively free, but lacking in political organization and capacity to rule their neighbors. The peoples of Asia on the other hand are intelligent and skillful in temperament, but lack spirit, so that they are in continuous subjection and slavery. But the Greek race participates in both characters, just as it occupies the middle position geographically, for it is both spirited and intelligent; hence it continues to be free and to have very good political institutions, and to be capable of ruling all mankind if it attains constitutional unity." [1]

Agree or disagree with his (perhaps chauvinistic) assessment of his own people, but he at least realizes that governmental forms do not exist in a vacuum.

> This kind of thinking is also used as a defensive tool against real debate about the morality of what China does.

I would love to have a moral debate about what China is doing, but that would require moving beyond a reactive 'they are not a democracy, and hence automatically wrong'. I am saying this as a Chinese person whose family personally greatly suffered during the Cultural Revolution.

Let's have a real conversation about, what the proper role of government is, what its ends ought to be, and how that interacts with the experience of its host civilization and its history.

[1] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...