We keep hearing shit about how Chinese leaders get hot under the collar because students studying in the US...

You're mad if you're seriously comparing Singapore (which has an actually functioning democratic system and rule of law) to the DPRK's corrupt military dictatorship or Syria's failed state.

this is b/s for the simple reason that the leadership's sprogs are all in the UK, the US studying.

The kind of thing you're talking about happened a lot with
India, Gandhi for example worked in Britain. Don't know if it happened with other places.

I have no doubt it's a democracy but it's a problematic democracy with limited press freedom and laws designed to get people they don't like.

Many Chinese come to the West and see it for what it really is: mindless hedonism, uppity minorities, excessive freedoms, disregard towards taking education serious.

They are already safe, clothed, housed and protected, and with rising incomes. The West has nothing to offer them, they feel.

I lived in a dorm with a Chinese girl from an affluent family who stated that she admired Hitler.

The Mandate of Heaven culture lives well even in the modern age: as long as the country is stable and improving, they don't give a flying fuck about democracy.

You mean just like the UK?

This. 49% of Westerners today (and I don't include Eastern Europe in that) are cucks with no survival instincts, 49% are stuck being unable to fix things because of the other 49% and 2% are making bank keeping the whole thing divided.

there's two result of western education here:
They either become westernised, pro democracy, super liberal and modern, or, they go full reactionary traditionalist 'west is decaying, we're the future', or somewhere between
But most are indifference and don't care

To add almost all older generations are on the first group, today it's second group is more dominant

Donald Trump and Brexit have been a goldmine of propaganda for those pushing the second view.

I think the difference is that in places like China and Singapore the government is made up of technocrats who push what is proven to work instead of what ideology says. Under Mao pushing ideology didn't work out so good.

>But...how often does that happen?

It might not happen all that often but when it does.....

>After switching to a technical school at Russey Keo, north of Phnom Penh, Saloth Sar qualified for a scholarship for technical studies in France. He studied radio electronics at the EFR in Paris from 1949 to 1953.

>places like China
China is already collapsing

Honestly. Most Chinese see how shit our government is and snicker.

Sure they can't vote, but at least their government is run by engineers and scientists and get shit done.

While the US is run by lawyers and career politicians with low IQ and say they believe that dinosaurs were on the Ark and its so dysfunctional that its surprised we haven't collapsed into a 3rd world nation.

Oh. And don't think your vote matters. The electoral system is rigged with gerrymandering so you only get one more choice in candidates than the Chinese elections.

This is a meme that has been going on for the past 10 years. China is doing fine.

These are the people that put up with millions of people dying of starvation and they still worshiped their leaders.

>While the US is run by lawyers and career politicians with low IQ and say they believe that dinosaurs were on the Ark and its so dysfunctional that its surprised we haven't collapsed into a 3rd world nation.
Obviously we have a secret. Also if wasn't for western globalist importing 100,000 American factories to China in the past two decades you'd be far behind us. Thank our business leaders greed for your success.

Because dictators want to concentrate power in themselves. The average middle-class college student want to spread the power around.

Assad holds power with the help of a torturing, murdering secret police. If you can't put aside your politics and at least acknowledge that the guy is scum, I don't know what to tell you.

Yo desu. I'm American. I actually dislike our own government. I wouldn't want to live in China, but hell we could do with our own reworking of our government.

China despite being autocratic is something that actually has a functional government instead of a popularity contents about people bragging how they believe in talking snakes and how global warming isn't real.

>people bragging how they believe in talking snakes
How fucking behind the times are you? No one America brags about being a creationist, it's a heavily marginalized group of people regulated to a few states
>and how global warming isn't real.
The normie consensus is that global warming is very real. Nobody brags about it.

...

>bill maher
Into the trash it goes

gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx

42%.

gallup.com/poll/206030/global-warming-concern-three-decade-high.aspx

32%, down from 45 two years ago.

>mindless hedonism
And are you going to tell me that well-off Chinese are any bit less hedonistic? That they don't spend a bunch of money on drink, bling, and fancy cars?
>uppity minorities
Which is a police matter. Our problem in the West with criminal minorities is that the police don't do their job well enough at enforcing existing laws, not that we need new laws or to give the government more powers. We just have to fund and train our cops better and push back a bit against the leftist "criminals are just misunderstood victims" narrative. Doesn't mean going all the way to China-style policies (and corrupt police force, from what I understand) would be better.
>excessive freedoms
Like what exactly?
>disregard towards taking education serious
Chinese take education seriously because you need to if you want to take your family from being small village farmers to middle class in one generation. If America's economy was like China's I'm sure more Americans would take education seriously, too.
>I lived in a dorm with a Chinese girl from an affluent family who stated that she admired Hitler.
There are idiots everywhere. She probably has family members who were killed by the Chinese version of Hitler a few decades ago, but is too dumb to realize it.
> as long as the country is stable and improving, they don't give a flying fuck about democracy.
And they will always be second-rate compared to the West if they continue along this line of thinking. Democracy is messy, but ultimately all democracy really is, is a way to have competing social groups all able to do their thing at the same time without resorting to violence to do battle with each other. Democracy is good for innovation since it allows people to do whatever they want as long as they just don't cross the line into using violence to get what they want. At the end of the day, I do think it will generally outcompete more government-driven paradigms.

The US is not a democracy. It is a two party plutocracy with their election guaranteed by corporate money, gerrymandering, and a 200 year old electoral system created to defend slavery.

But our government is functional too... yes, there's a lot of idiocy, but it's not like the government is falling apart. Most of the idiocy is effectively contained by various social and legal mechanisms.

It's a sliding scale.

American democracy is more functional than democracy in places like India or Brazil, but probably worse than in places like Switzerland or Iceland.

I disagree. I think that the US *is* democratic (I won't get into the democracy/republic semantic technicality). Why? Because in the US, people *could* vote for major changes if they wanted to. They just don't. The plutocrats don't rule mainly by brute force - they rule by propagandizing and buying votes. If 90% of Americans decided to radically change the political system in the next election, it would actually happen. People could also generate an enormous level of influence here by getting together and voting with their dollars as organized blocs.
Plutocrats rule the US, not because there are no mechanisms in place to get rid of them, but because Americans don't use those mechanisms.
Personally, given how stupid the average American is, I seriously doubt that things would actually improve if the plutocrat influence was ended... that said, to reiterate, I do think that the mechanisms exist to make pretty much any political changes people would want. It's just that Americans don't use them.

It'd have to be a coordinated effort in every national-level election.

China only really became viable in the 70s. Before then it was run by a dude who wanted to divide everything up into self sufficient farmer communes that smelt their own steel and shit in a perpetual state of revolution.

Vice President Pence's catchphrase is
>I'm a Christian
>a Conservative
>and a Republican
>in that order.

His "brand" is literally that he puts his ancient desert fables first, then his ideology, and then his party. Nothing about the country or the people in there.

>faith means your a bad leader
>majority of human history people were faithful
>many great people were men of faith
>might as well assume someones a bad leader for believing in an ideology like liberalism or communism

It's basically an old East Asian meme, probably started in Japan in the Taisho era or something, still exists to this day

ha yeah, Gaddaffi Jnr too.

>American democracy is more functional than democracy in places like India or Brazil
That's hardly clear. The Democracy Index gives the US and India roughly the same (and quite respectable) overall score, Brazil is a bit lower than them. On top of that India and Brazil actually score higher than the US in the categories "Electoral process and pluralism" and "Civil Liberties", the US scores far head of them solely in "Political culture" (that's about how much the general population trusts democracy and rejects authoritarianism, little to do with the general functioning of the political system.)

You know those Turkish reforms that Erdogan pushed through to consolidate his dictatorship? They made the system MORE like the American presidential system, not less. If we don't see the same abuses in America it's largely because of the better "political culture." Inversely, it's why the democracies they tried setting up in the Middle East fail so profoundly.

>The Norks are special like that.
pol pot went to french uni
kenyatta went to english uni
simon bolivar spent his young adulthood getting educated and touring europe
zhou enlai spent 1920-1924 in europe
deng xiaoping spend 1919-1927 in europe
chiang kai shek studied in (liberal) japan from1907-1911
ho chi mihn spent 1909-1919 years wandering the world before spending a few years in france educating himself in nationalist politics and stuff

tldr you don't know shit

>multiparty parliamentary representative democracy
>
>
>
>

>anecdote: the post

>No one America brags about being a creationist,
hahaha how behind are you?
>it's a heavily marginalized group of people regulated to a few states
states that have disproportionate power because they have two senators by default, the electoral college gives them disproportionate representation and they're gerrymandered in such a way that all house districts are republican, meaning that in mid-term elections, the elections normies give jack-shit about, these so-called "marginalized" voters of yours turn out in huge numbers cause their pastor told them so.

>train our cops better and push back a bit against the leftist "criminals are just misunderstood victims" narrative.
how deluded are you? crime in the US is at all time lows, despite a small uptick last year. on top of that cops already treat minorities in accord with your racist fantasies.

>they rule by propagandizing and buying votes
that's not democracy, thats mass bribery aka plutocracy or oligarchy. you know this is EXACTLY how elections in ancient rome worked (and all so-called "democracies" before WWI or even WWII desu), except on a city-wide scale rather than a nationwide one? We don't call republican rome a """"representative democracy""" because they elected their consuls, we call it a plutocracy, a republic an oligarchy or an oligarchical republic. Once elections can be bought and sold on a mass scale it's far from the democratic ideal

to add, its also a vicious cycle. it's not a matter of voters refusing to choose, but incentives increasingly force them to become apathetic. gerrymandering makes the US states essentially one-party states. The election in these are hardly contested by the other party, but among two candidates with similar views from the same parties, of which one will win because of his superior funding from his rich donors, the party apparatus, or both.

Lol at this shilling

>who is our VP

>being creationist and having a faith are the same thing

Definitely this

t. Gordon Chang

Chinks universities actually allow liberal philosophy(Locke and the gang) to be thought and reflected on, but they don't teach Marx, because they don't want any non-dogmatic readings of Marx.

People who think that science and religion are oppossed to each other are the weakest race.

They are mostly concentrated in the US too.

t. burgestan

Explain to me literally any way to avoid this happening.
And don't answer with some meme answer like "le education" because that does not work.

>Believing in democratic peace theory

Assad just wanted to be an eye doctor but his brother and the desired heir to Syria died in a car crash so he was brought in from London to take over from his father. I doubt at this point he even has total control, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an elite political/military class behind the covers he has to tussle with.

>American democracy is more functional than democracy in places like India
India has multi party elections at the state level with much higher participation rates than the US.

>having faith means you can disregard pesky facts.
American faith everyone.

Most of the Chinese students that come to study in the west are the kids of those Chinese leaders.

I used to go to a private Catholic high school and we'd get exchange students that would be the kids of generals or politicians (from the rumors I heard). They were loaded as fuck, too.

The VP in America is a literal powerless nobody. That'd be like using Joe biden as an example for anything.

Trends are trends. You can beat dead horses and pretend that the scopes monkey trial is an ungoing process but it isn't. The creationism boogyman is about as dead as homosexual marriage being illegal.

mostly you can't. we have yet to create a system that can check the elites indefinitely. however, there are probably mechanisms that can keep it at bay that are better than the ones we have now. maybe we'll get to a better system one day though, desu, athenian democracy had a good run, for all its flaws, at checking the elites.

but just cause this degeneration can't be avoided doesn't mean that it's appropriate to call our oligarchy a """democracy""". Whenever US politicians appeal to it it's really empty talk to make people feel good about themselves when, in fact, they have little power over decisions in government and what their politicians do.

the VP is successor to the president if he dies or resigns. Cheney also showed that the VP can have immense power over a weak clueless president, of which trump is one. Lyndon Johnson was also more powerful than kennedy with regards to influence and political acumen. Pence for his part has years of experience in politics and so can work behind the scenes. So its not just about a weak president, but also how much informal power and influence a VP has.
Also the VP will always have some importance because the VP suceeds the president, and theres a strong possibility that Trump will be forced to resign if things continue as they do in Washington.