I might not be the most bullish person on China since I think they have many non-trivial problems brewing beneath the surface, but you have to admit that there is a lot to be said about how their government operates when it comes to building up the country. There is an inherent strength in a nationalist form of government that is hard to deny.
Chinese leaders take the nation’s resources and reinvest them into its own country. This is what happens when it has leaders that care first and foremost about China. Contrast it to your typical Western democracy, which allows its treasury to be looted by all kinds of self-serving miscreants — the US is at $4 trillion dumped in the Middle East so far. Corruption in the Chinese government is certainly not uncommon, but I’ll bet it’s no more common than what occurs in today’s America. Every member of Congress comes out a multi-multi-millionaire. Think of the massive amount of tax revenue generated at the federal and local levels in the US, and consider that you can’t even get the potholes filled in your local road.
The problem with modern Western democracies is that they’re all led by “hired hands” who have no real stake in the countries they’re leading. They’re sort of like the CEO who takes over a company he didn’t build, and writes a golden parachute into his contract — he doesn’t care if the company goes under, as long as he gets his. At least in China, President Xi and the rest of the Politburo know that if they don’t keep things running smoothly, they’ll be hanging from lampposts. There’s no similar fear in Western politics. In a worst case scenario, a politician is maybe voted out of office, but he still gets to keep all the capital he accumulated.
I think Western countries are going to have to take a bit of timeout and re-examine if the strategy we’ve adopted in modern decades is the right solution for the future.