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Comment by amai | Hacker News Reader

„A crucial mistake,’ according to Lighthizer, had been to let China into the WTO and treat it as just another country like America’s free-market allies.“

I agree. The WTO should be limited to democratic countries. It was a huge mistake to have countries like China, Russia and Saudi-Arabia in the WTO. These countries don’t play by the rules and consequently should be punished by the highest tariffs possible.

Therefor I‘m in favor of tariffs on good and services from dictatorships. But I‘m against tariffs on goods and services from democratic countries.

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Unfortunately we are in the process of dismantling democracy at home as well.

AFAIK China is democratic and has elections.

Are there choices?

Of course I guess in America with our two party oligopoly we can’t really talk that much.

Depends at which level. From what I understand, democracy in China exists for local elections (they are mostly in the hand of local small bourgeoisie, but you have a choice).

I doubt they get a choice of communist party or non communist party. I'm not sure any communist party in history has survived giving its grateful proletariat the chance to vote for something else?

The communist party is the government, but within the party there is a significant amount of ideological diversity. The most notable examples are between “true believers” like Mao and pragmatists like Deng and Hu

It's the wrong way to look about that imho. That's not the impression chineese i've talked too had, and if the most rural, disenfranchised people i've ever met have the illusion of choice, like most people in western countries, i don't think you can reject that just by saying "but the CCP!".

First, and that wasn't my original point at all, you have a lot of different motions in the CCP, that you could easily compare to US 2 party system (it's even more democratic in a way because you have more choice between motions and those can align on specific policies).

But my point was about local elections. You don't vote for a party unless you're a militant: you vote for a person that you believe in, someone who will make choice for your village/small town.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index China is on place 145 from 167 countries. About the first 100 countries are all democratic. Everything below 100 is a dictatorship.

And since mainland China was never a democracy it can be said that China is more than 2000 years behind the West in democratic development.

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