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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

> Theoretically, a government should represent its people, which should be the foundation of democracy. If that foundation were broken

Well, in many countries it absolutely is. And there is no way to fix this.

And even if a government was really elected legitimately and chosen not to recognize Taiwan I doubt this meant the people didn't know Taiwan is a de-facto independent country and actively wanted to keep it unrecognized. To be honest I myself have only found out Taiwan recognition is limited a couple of years ago. I always knew there is such a country and never knew about its diplomatic problems.

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> Well, in many countries it absolutely is. And there is no way to fix this.

That a legal government of a modern democratic country cannot represent its people is a horrendous claim. As a strong believer of democracy, I'd rather assume that you were the minority in this case. The everyone claim may hold true for everyone you know (among the minority of your country of course).

I was writing to make it clear that it's inappropriate for minority to make such "everybody" claim. And obviously the above reasoning applies perfectly to EVERYBODY holding similar opinions, especially those living in modern democratic countries.

There are countries with high corruption rates where elections are well-known to be manipulated in a number of illegal ways, e.g. by tossing in huge numbers of fake votes and by blocking opposition from participating in elections for fake reasons. And even if the elections were held correctly, an elected government which ignores its duty to protect minorities is not democratic.

As a strong believer of democracy are you naive enough to believe all the elections are perfectly fair, no party at power ever cheats to imitate democracy and that democracy is about everybody sacrificing themselves to obey "the majority"? Do you believe the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea is actually democratic? Do you believe the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia is liberal?

"As a strong believer of democracy are you naive enough to believe all the elections are perfectly fair, no party at power ever cheats to imitate democracy and that democracy is about everybody sacrificing themselves to obey "the majority?"

As believer of HEALTHY democracy, I've never made any such implications. Guys from US/UK/EU claiming Taiwan is a country should go protesting right away, don't let democracy down!

As I already said, if democracy doesn't work in your country, don't waste your time caring about China/TW/HK unless you actually live there.

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