The West's competition of ideas with China is not between a democracy and authoritarianism, but between two fundamentally different outlooks on political systems. The former sees democracy as an end in itself. The latter sees any political system as a means.
Eric X. Li, venture capitalist
Insight page, February 17
The man speaks for many of his compatriots in his rejection of democracy. In significant elements of Chinese society today, democracy is castigated as a foreign imposition and economically wasteful.
This begs one crucial question. If a government does not rule with the consent of the governed, by what authority does it rule at all?
The answer of non-democratic systems in olden times (of more than just, 'You shut up or you're dead meat') was that the monarch ruled by the authority of God. 'Son of Heaven' is one of the oldest titles of Chinese emperors, for instance.
This has changed in more modern times. That infamous Russian thug Vladimir Lenin sponsored the notion that democracy is only a route to a communist society. Once communism has been achieved, there is no longer a need for the ballot box. The party of the people is in power. It does not need to be elected twice. This is also still the official fiction in Beijing, although coloured by Mao Zedong's brutal observation that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Since 1989, his cynical view of the matter has, in reality, become the basis of government authority.
But it does not really sit well as a credible claim of right and another has evolved in Beijing - the role of government is to make people rich and we have made you rich. We are therefore a legitimate government. Leaving aside that both the premise and logic of this assertion are debatable, China's present wealth is mostly the product of world peace, general world prosperity, foreign investment, technology transfers, and rapid communications.