> how can those dissidents even dare to think that maybe their well-being improved despite their government rather than thanks to it?

I can turn this around: how are you so sure that the government is not a significant contributing factor to the current level of wellbeing?

Both China and India have massive population and started at similar levels of development and GDP in the 1950s. How is it that China is so much more successful than India at fighting poverty and at economic development? I don't believe for a second that Chinese are inherent superior to Indians. In fact, Kishore Mahbubani wrote that India can become stronger than China if only they take the right policy steps. These steps require active government work and can't be done by regular citizen. https://mahbubani.net/can-india-become-stronger-than-china-y...

Look at new democracies in the past 50 years. Which ones have developed successfully? Not one. Brazil and India are full of slums. South Korea and Taiwan had most of their development done during authoritarian times.

The evidence shows that governance plays a major role in developmental succes. Where is your evidence that shows that the Chinese government played no role in China's current success?

> Isn’t it paradoxical to state that the lack of transparency is what helped Chinese government contain COVID?

That was not at all my point.

My point was that the Chinese government contained COVID despite (not because of) relative untransparency, and that western governments failed to do so despite being more transparent.

The logical conclusions are then:

1. A certain threshold of transparency may be a necessary factor for containing COVID. Assuming that the threshold is not 0, then whatever that threshold is, it seems China is not below that threshold, otherwise they would have failed.

2. Transparency by itself is not a sufficient factor for containing COVID. Other factors are also necessary. Whatever those other factors are, it looks like China has enough of those while western countries don't have enough.

A corollary from these intermediate conclusions is then: western liberal ideology itself may be flawed. Maybe the western liberal model isn't the only one that can lead to success. Maybe it isn't The End Of History, and there should be other ways to judge a country's model other than "how similar is it to the western liberal model?".

I agree, transparency is a good thing. But it looks to me as if most people oversell its importance (as well as the importance of many others aspects of the western liberal model), while being wilfully blind to the western liberal model's weaknesses.

At the same time, it looks to me as if most people don't give China's model the credit it deserves, despite empirical success, even though China's model is by no means perfect and has many problems of its own. Yet most people laser-focus on the flaws (maybe even exaggerating or distorting flaws) while completely ignoring its strengths. This is not the path to good understanding nor good policy.

> And thus we’ve circled back back to the possibility of China’s invasion of Taiwan, a country that appears to not want China’s model to be forced onto itself.

The Taiwan issue isn't about forcing China's model onto it, it's about sovereignty. China's doesn't care one bit whether Taiwan is democratic, autocratic or whatever. Conversely, a democratic China wouldn't let Taiwan go because people see Taiwan as unfinished business of the Chinese civil war, which in turn is seen by people as the result of western imperialism.