Geopolitics: Does China Slowly Turn Into A Democracy?

 (Drivebycuriosity) - It seems that China is politically changing. This week Hong Kong`s leader Carrie Lam, a puppet of Beijing, withdraw permanently the extradition bill which permitted the extradition of Hong Kong law breakers to China (wikipedia). The bill was a response to a murder in Taiwan. A man from Hong Kong had murdered his girlfriend there but could not be charged because his extradition wasn`t legal. The bill caused massive protests in Hong Kong and the demonstrators demanded its withdrawal.

The withdrawal is remarkable. Beijing demonstrates surprising patience and clemency. How would New York´s cops respond to demonstrators who block streets, attack the airport and throw Molotov cocktails? Beijing`s response to the Hong Kong events show a huge difference to  China`s politics from 1989 which led to the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Then troops with assault rifles and tanks fired at the demonstrators and those trying to block the military's advance into Tiananmen Square. Estimates of the death toll vary from several hundreds to several thousands, with thousands more wounded. (wikipedia).


Do Dictatorships Mellow?

It is clear that China today is very different from China 1989. The political change supports an old theory that dictatorships could mellow over the time (discussed for example in this book amazon  ). BBC author Rachel Nuwer writes that “ just as violence on a whole has declined across history, so, too, has the number of dictatorships, especially since the 1970s, as regimes across Latin America and Eastern Europe fell” (bbc).  She quotes Richard Overy, a historian at the University of Exeter: “It’s harder for people to justify dictatorships today, partly because the whole globe is in the eye of the media,. Getting away with things is more difficult than it used to be.”

I think it is not a coincidence that the political change went along with fundamental economical changes. In the 1980s Beijing started reforms which allowed private enterprises and stock markets. Today the country has a growing service sector, based on private enterprises, and huge private companies like Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu & Huawei are driving the economy and China´s technological progress. Beijing shows that they are interested in economic growth and rising standards of living because this reduces the risk of social unrest. They can achieve these goals better when they give their population more flexibility and freedom which includes more democracy. China`s economic rise in the recent decades may be part of a slow democratizing.