I listened to a commentator state a year or so ago that China is not so much an ex-Communist Country (although it certainly was one) as a country trying to find itself for the last hundred years or so. There was Sun Yatsen, who tried to move the country towards a republic, then the dictator Chaing-Kai Shek and the Kuomintang. Then Mao and the communists. And Now.
That was then. This is now, and China is a post-emergent world power that will surpass the US and perhaps even the European Union in the not-too-distant Future. Probably this is the point that China will change again. But into what?
Russia is not to different in its exegesis. It was a monarchy and a quasi-feudal state until the 1860s when the Serfs were freed. It remained a monarchy, and an undemocratic one at that, until pressure on Czar Nicholas forced him to create the Duma, a Russian parliament. Then came the Bolshevieks and we have Communism. Communism predictably falls and we have an oligarchy with the dictator Putin as its head.
The point to take away is that neither country has a democratic history and democracy cannot be realistically expected. At least for the not-to-distant future. But what is in their future? Economics will guide their path. More Wealth, more demands for democracy. Less wealth, a further descent into tyranny. That is what these countries do best.
Always vigilant, seldom accurate.
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