I posit that it comes down to what people value. Up-thread there is a discussion about how a Zulu man lamented the fall of Apartheid because, to paraphrase, “at least the streets were clean.”
Of course the issue is that we could have clean streets without genocides, and that is true of human society everywhere, but while one might value clean streets enough to be OK with (what I believe to be) unreasonable and unnecessary costs, others care more for being right and grandstanding to score political points, gain power, or simply make themselves feel better by attacking others.
As long as society continues to pay deference to people who value those things more, the cleanliness of our metaphorical and literal streets will always be secondary.
"China hasn’t yet proven the superiority of its system, but its successes raise the uncomfortable question: Can this be what wins? Can universal surveillance, speech control, suppression of religion and minorities, and economic command and control really be the keys to national power and stability in the 21st century? How could that be true, when those same things failed so comprehensively in the 20th?. . . it’s useful and to think about how and why totalitarianism might be well-adapted to the world of the 21st century. In fact, I have a theory of how this might be true. This theory is only a conjecture — *it’s something I don’t believe in*, but also something I can’t yet convince myself is wrong."
By the end of it I don't really get what this article is trying say. The first 2/3rds is about all the shiny things China has and people like it because they don't see the dumpster fire in the alley that made it all happen.
If one was concerned about the direction of liberal democracies outside of the West, India would be a more interesting place to look.