Why is China frightened of allowing its citizens democracy while India is doing fine with democracy?
First of all, I think it’s important to point out that if anything the Chinese Communist Party is frightened of democracy, not “China”. I have lived in China for many years and never talked to a Chinese person who said he/she was frightened of democracy. The simple answer: The CCP is frightened of democracy because: • It would rob them of total political control over China. • It would open up investigations and discussions of a range of controversies involving people currently in power: ongoing and past corruption, abuse of power, the killings of protesters in 1989, the Cultural Revolution, The Great Leap Forward, the civil war etc. • It would start a process of rewriting the official account of historic events, such as the ones mentioned above, which would not only threaten people who were involved and are now in power, but also generally change the story of how modern China was created in a way that would make the CCP look much worse. Moreover, the question suggests that the regimes
I’m not sure why you try to compare China to India: the reasons of the tight control have to do with the fears in China leaders — and their own comparisons. The first one, explicit in some of their most candid interviews is they believe they are orchestrating the largest shift out of rural poverty towards a modern society ever — and that this generates too much tension not to exert control: wage shifts between generations, expropriation, urban exode, factory conditions, all that at a planetary-scale magnitude. It looks a lot like what made the XIXth and XXth century in Western society so tense, all rolled into 30 years. They are no exaggerating when expecting “things to blow up”: even with the tight control, vigilante justice against corruption, “flesh&blood search engines” against urban smug attitudes, nationalist mobs are very impressive. For being on the wrong side of the Anti-French demonstration two years ago… that control is needed. The general idea it to be as close as Singapore
India has always been a democracy, since independence. One of the reasons for adopting a democracy is that culturally the country so diverse that a multi party democracy was seen as the only viable way for equitable development. The initial governments were more socialist but things have changed post liberalization(since 1991). It will be interesting to note that 2 states in India are ruled by communist parties.
As Vivek mentions, India has had political democracy for most of its history since independence (maybe all, depending on how you define Indira’s PMship). What India did not have was economic freedom, until the end of the Cold War. In the early days, India, like Israel, was even Soviet-leaning within the neutral bloc. India followed China by about 10 years in its pursuit of economic success. Additionally, Bengal, one of the Communist-run states, is possibly the most liberalized economically as it seeks the full fruits of American businesses’ desire to outsource and cut costs as much as possible.
