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What Beijing learned from Tiananmen: Democracy isn’t needed for prosperity

Charles Foran: The Globe and Mail
Instead, China’s rise to superpower status has proved a happy model for authoritarian governments hoping to pull their economies out of poverty without sacrificing control or conceding ground to notions of civil society. It has delinked prosperity from democracy.
China hasn't done anything novel. Machiavelli sourly noted this in his satirical treatise, The Prince: “The answer is that one would like to be both the one and the other; but because it is difficult to combine them, it is far safer to be feared than loved if you cannot be both.”

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