Granted my high school American history is a little hazy, so I'm not sure how America, up until now at least, for 200 years seems to have made representative democracy work fairly well.
But historically, the world's most advanced nations being made up of representative democracies is a categorical anomoly that only arose out of the post-WW2 period. Arguing that China couldn't become an advanced nation without representative democracy was always a moot point since none of the European Empires or even early modern Japan rose to power as representative democracies. In fact, leading up to WW2 a higher percentage of the ROC's population were alloted suffrage compared to Imperial Japanese citizens.
So when people ask Chinese the condescending question, "How can you put your faith in unelected men and women to make decisions solely on the belief that they earned their positions via merit and are well educated?" Tell them precisely that's what most of humanity in the modern era had been doing up until the last half century and it worked out well enough for the winners of that era, so why not?
Point out too, modern CPC officials get to where they are via merit, whereas even up until 1900 only the nobility and well connected in Europe and Japan could participate in politics.
