[tomm]

Zeer interessant artikel van de BBC.

And some, like China's meritocratic system – in which government officials are not elected by the public, but appointed and promoted according to their competence and performance – should not be dismissed outright. “To put them all in the same camp is ridiculous,” says Bell. “It’s not a good way of trying to understand what’s going on in China.”
The Communist Party of China has 88 million members. Its membership is managed by the Department of Organisation, which is essentially a huge human resources department. To be a member of the party, candidates must pass a set of examinations. Government officials are thus selected from across the country and from various sectors of society according to merit. Promotion from low-ranking official to the very top of government is then – in principle – simply a matter of performance.

Political officials at the top all have substantial experience at running a country – “unlike in the US with the current president”. The government is also not subject to the electoral cycle and can focus on its policies. “If they say they’re going to do something by 2030, we can be pretty sure they’re going to do it,” he says.

This has allowed China to pull millions out of poverty in just a few decades, build a vast amount of new infrastructure in the biggest construction drive the world has ever seen, and begin to tackle its substantial urban pollution and greenhouse emissions. Officials used to be judged mainly on how well they did at reducing poverty, says Bell. Now they are expected to make environmental improvements too.
Bell says lots of surveys show that the Chinese system has strong support within the country at most levels of society, where the government is viewed as providing a form of guardianship.
He agrees with Hoey that as China gets richer and its middle class grows, more people will want to have a say in how the country is run. But that need not necessarily mean a call for democracy. Instead, perhaps more people will sign up to join the ruling party. Everybody now has equal rights to take the examinations that put you on the road to becoming a public official, he says. “There are different ways of participating in politics.”

Whatever happens, democracy is much more likely to flourish when it is homegrown. The attempts in the last few decades to export democracy around the world have proved to be an absolute disaster, says Hoey. “The whole idea is wrong in principle because democracy is not ours to dispense,” she says. “It has to come from the people to have any meaning. It needs to have roots deep in the values and culture of the country.”
Yet the West has tried to export democracy not only at the point of a gun – such as in the many military interventions in the Middle East – but also by imposing legislation. The EU pushes its Western values and body of laws on new members, for example. This can be quite intrusive, says Hoey. As a result, rather than being seen as a universal human aspiration, democracy can sometimes come across as a specifically Western product – and rejected as such.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2017...e-of-democracy

Het Chinese systeem werkt beter, zorgt voor betere resultaten en is betrouwbaarder. Chinezen willen helemaal geen "westerse democratie" volgens peilingen. En alle pogingen om "westerse democratie" op te leggen in niet-westerse landen zijn een mislukking. Ook Oost-Europa wordt in snel tempo terug autoritairder.