I don't think so. Democracy is rule by the will of the people. It has only become an ugly word due to how the West has mangled it and then presented the mangled version of it to the world as democracy. China is truly a land where the government is extremely sensitive to the people's will and any corruption that is revealed, immediately and harshly dealt with to abate any feelings of unfairness in the people. This is closer to real democracy than anything in the West. The West says that it's democratic but the only thing democratic about it is the use of elections, which are represent a very thin veneer of real democracy. The fact is that the people are forced to choose candidates based on who they hate less, then when they get into office, they are lobbied into doing things nobody wants and protests don't do anything. No matter who you elect, your taxes are going up and police are taking over your city with Draconian laws; the people are only allowed to quibble on the details of how that process is to take place with no power to stop them from happening. In Germany, it's a crime to express an opinion against Ukraine for Russia. Same in the UK with the monarchy. In some places, the politicians openly say that no matter what the citizens want, no matter how hard the people protest and fight, they will put Ukraine first without regard to public will. And even this totally bullshit version of democracy is an overly kind summarization for some countries because CIA hacking can simply give the outcome of elections to the candidate most willing to sacrifice that country to support American interests against their own people. This is why we hate "democracy." The West has tricked people into thinking that this is democracy. In China, there are no direct elections, but the will of the people is carried out by more complex, sensitive and advanced mechanisms. If there is an online trend, the government follows and adjusts to it. If there is a protest, the government tries to solve the problem in the area. If corruption or incompetence is reported and made public, the official is sacked. In the US, it's perfectly legal for politicians to be corrupt and fail at everything they do and even if they step over the line and get caught, they continue to serve for years and years until their lengthy court case is washed away with time and they get off scott free. If anything, China's success is because China is more democratic than the West by far, to the true definition of the word, not the Western bastardization of it.
I thought that this was definitely the Onion until I read that it definitely wasn't.
News from any sufficiently dysfunctional society is indistinguishable from the Onion.
