>On this topic I've noticed something quaint on HN: people making excuses for China's "special" situation or even arguing against democracy itself.

I'm of several different minds about this.

a) I'm against many things the Chinese government is doing (religious persecution, surveillance, credit system, censorship, etc.).

b) I prefer populations to find their own way, not to be subjected to foreign intervention. If they want western-style democracy they should bring it themselves.

c) Foreign interventions are always or almost always hypocritical and self-serving. Especially when the same foreign powers play friends with dictators or support a worst regime at the same time they condemn another. There's also a track record of living places worse than they were, from (Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.).

d) The foreign population is easily manipulated as to the truth on the ground, especially if a country is the "enemy du jour". It's easy to find dissidents and make it like the whole nation agrees with them on this or that matter, when it doesn't. Especially if the people you find are more like your culture (e.g. westernized in this case), which could make it even less representative to their compatriots, but more likable to your population. Bad as the CCP can be, it can still be the case that many Chinese still like it -- after all the country does well, they rise out of poverty, the might feel safer, be more conservative, etc. Heck, some Americans can't fathom why half their country can possibly like Trump, and they'll know whether the average Chinese might be OK with the regime?

e) China especially might be worse off if the CCP doesn't hold, especially with a sudden transition. It already had very bloody civil wars for the best part of the 20th century. Imagine the forces and power struggles in a 1.6 billion strong country if there's a power vacuum...

f) Democracy is a cultural issue too. E.g. there's the saying "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety". But that's a tradeoff people might knowingly make still (plus "temporary safety" is a weasel word - what's to say they don't get real long-term safety by the trade-off?). In any case, some cultures might not prefer democracy (either because it's all relative, and down to preference, either, if we want to make a "our side knows best" stance, because they're not mature enough to want it). Decorative or not, for example, I can't understand why the British don't behead their royalty and be done with it. But there are people there who genuinely love it (even coming up with BS arguments, like tourism, for all the resources the royalty steals from the nation).

g) Many of the complains against China (not about domestic democracy government abuse), like "IP theft", unfair "government businesses/subsidies", have been leveled against Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Japan especially had all the same concerns, with the same ton ("stealing our IP", "their government funds their businesses", "they can only make copies of our stuff"), discussions in congress, heated debates in the press, etc. Also the whole "they're buying us" in the late 80s/early 90s when the Japanese bought US companies, Hollywood studios, record companies, etc. Most of those concerns are of the "those are good when we do them", variety (eg. trillion dollar Detroit bailout, huge agriculture and telcom subsidies, and so on) or the "we did them in the past and they benefited us greatly, now that we don't need them anymore they are bad" variety (e.g. https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/ ).