[Clubber]

I think the hopes were that China, once prospering in the global marketplace as a big player, would turn democratic. Over the last decade or two, we've come to realize the opposite has happened and the Western powers are adjusting.

Of course Western companies have made a lot of money off China with cheap labor and massive marketplace, so it wasn't entirely an altruistic endeavour.

[licebmi__at__]

Western powers still make deals with authoritarian/non-democratic states. At this point is naive to think that the grievances with china are because “they are not democratic”.

[Clubber]

>At this point is naive to think that the grievances with china are because “they are not democratic”.

No, the kid gloves are off because "they are not democratic." It's like being nice to the weird kid in school and the weird kid steals your lunch. No more being nice to the weird kid.

Also, consider if they were democratic, we might not be having the grievances we are currently having.

[Reki]

So how do you explain our relashionship with countries like Saudi Arabia? Because forget the bully, thats like being friends with the school shooter.

[Clubber]

What does that have to do with anything I said? Do you think we ally with countries for moral reasons? We allied with Stalin after he invaded Poland with Germany earlier in the same war.

[red-iron-pine]

that school shooter is rich af, and as much as everyone hates them, can lever that over the whole school.

[SR2Z]

Because geopolitics is a game where ALL the players are sociopaths and Saudi Arabia is basically too small for their government's admitted craziness to even register.

[licebmi__at__]

Let’s be real. The kid gloves would be off for any country, democratic or otherwise, that tries to compete on economic throughput and global influence with the US.

Unless you’re trying to argue that the rapid economic growth happened because they are not democratic, the idea that democracy has any relevance on US relations is laughable propaganda.

If the countries were really school kids, then I might accommodate for the idea that the school bully actually believes that he’s no longer nice to the weird kid because he’s weird. But even if some US citizens are childish, countries are not school kids.

[Clubber]

I think if you look past the last few news cycles and back into the 70s and especially the 90s, you'll better understand what our strategy with China has been.

>I think the hopes were that China, once prospering in the global marketplace as a big player, would turn democratic. Over the last decade or two, we've come to realize the opposite has happened and the Western powers are adjusting.

Which part of that do you disagree with?

[licebmi__at__]

I guess I disagree with everything. But mostly I disagree that anyone serious actually thought that entering on a global marketplace would turn any kind of nation democratic... but I mean people at the top can have any kind of ideologies, I shouldn't consider impossible that somebody actually bought the magical markets propaganda.

[Clubber]

>But mostly I disagree that anyone serious actually thought that entering on a global marketplace would turn any kind of nation democratic...

There's certainly research on the subject.

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/economic-integration-and-tran...

Exploiting improvements in air, relative to sea, transportation that occurred since the 1960s, and combining survey data with country level measures of democracy from 1960 to 2015, the authors document that trade with democracies increases both citizens’ support for democracy and countries’ democracy scores. Trade with non-democracies has no impact on either attitudes or institutions.

According to our results, doubling trade with democracies (a change in exposure equivalent to the inter-quartile range in our sample) increases an individual’s support for democracy by 0.58 points on a 1 to 4 scale. This is similar to the difference in attitudes towards democracy between Mexico and Norway, or that between Philippines and Italy. At the country level, our estimates imply that increasing trade with democratic partners by 80% (or its inter-quartile range) raises the democracy score by around 4 points (on a scale from -10 to +10). This is equivalent to the gap between Malaysia and Canada in 2010, or that between Turkey and Senegal in 2015.

[derelicta]

China is already democratic tho. They have workers congress on the national level, plenty of people's assemblies on the provencial and city level. They also have consultative assemblies for business issues.

Citizens are very satisfied of their government, despite some of its excesses, unlike so called western democratic governments.

Their material condititons are as good as in Europe, at least for most folks.

Just because you do not directly elect the president of your government doesn't make you less democratic. Switzerland doesn't elect its government by universal suffrage, neither does the UK, or the EU. Their democratic model is just different.