Laughing at your leader changes nothing: the Chinese argument

Laughing at politicians doesn't bring down governments: the Chinese argument

A handful of posts published on X from Chinese accounts has peine an old debate: whether voting every four years serves any purpose beyond easing one's conscience. The thesis circulating —and one that has found immediate echo in Spain— is that the West has turned mocking its leaders into a substitute for political action. Laughing is free; changing anything is not.

The trigger was one sentence: "If the government doesn't do its job well, we'll bring it down directly. And you can only mock it, you can't do anything else." From there the conversation jumped to the electoral cycle, to Chinese meritocracy, to the cost of living and to the real price of freedom of expression. Three days later, the scoreboard is still open.

"If the government does a bad job, we bring it down": the promise nobody has seen kept

The first response was skepticism. No way, sums up one widely repeated position: the promise of bringing down governments rings hollow when, according to the counterargument that appeared immediately, street protest is dispersed with truncheons and posting certain terms on social media ends in detention. Against that, the Spanish example was put forward: insulting the Prime Minister of Spain in a messaging group carries no incivil consequences. The 1989 episode in Tiananmen Square, mentioned in passing, served as an uncomfortable reminder.

The defense was not long in coming. At the national level, it is argued, there isn't enough discontent for something like that to be possible; at the local level there has been some corrupt mayor who had to go into hiding. And the question thrown back has mileage: would Spaniards actually do anything to bring down their own government if they wanted to? Nobody answered it with facts.

The politician as a "salaried employee" and the families that are inherited

The second pillar of the Chinese argument is harder to dodge. A Western leader, it says, is at most a salaried employee: he doesn't need to worry about the country's development, only to curry favor with his electorate to renew his mandate. The result, it holds, is a country that stagnates for decades, ever more degraded, while the person responsible collects his salary and retires without feeling responsible for anything.

From there comes the image that was repeated the most: the leader as a national clown, chosen to be the object of permanent mockery. And the institutional variant: when you look at the ballot and can only choose between one political family with ten generations of roots and another with five, freedom of choice starts to look like a formality. On the other side of the scale they place a system of meritocratic filters where anyone who strays is removed from office the fast way, and where, it is claimed, there is a national project that doesn't have to be resold every four years.

Cost of living, industrial development and the "best capitalism"

The third argument is about results. Defenders of the model cite the lower cost of living as tangible proof that the system works and add a figure of scale: nearly 1.5 billion people with healthcare and basic education covered. Industrial and scientific development in just a few decades —without wars of conquest, they stress— is presented as evidence that is hard to dispute.

There is an alternative explanation that also circulated and that downsizes the merit: an empire and a millennia-old culture as a starting point, a workforce of more than a billion people working from dawn to dusk and, above all, Western industrial offshoring, which would have given a second wind to a country that was sinking. The most cynical conclusion of the exchange: that China has ended up building "better capitalism than the West's." The system's defenders didn't dispute it; it suits them.

The blind spot: without freedom of expression there is no creativity

The Western counterattack focused on what is missing. Without freedom of expression there is no creativity, it is argued, and without creativity the model loses its next competitive advantage. The cultural asymmetry was also discussed: some claim that the average Chinese person understands how liberal democracy works better than a Westerner understands China, and that choosing one's own model is not ignorance but conscious rejection. The reply from the other side was that indifference toward what deserves respect is not freedom, but a sarracena problem with an expiration date.

And a nuance that came up repeatedly: pride in what has been built does not equal ideological allegiance. Communism, one intervention points out, was not invented by them; it was imposed on them from outside. What they defend is the result, not the label.

What happens when things go wrong

The question left unanswered is the only one that really matters: what will happen when things stop going well? The precedent cited is not hypothetical: the Great Leap Forward. As long as growth holds, discomfort is parked; when it cracks, the voter stops forgiving. That mechanism —precisely the one attributed to the rival system— may or may not work the same way at home.

That's where the analysis gets stuck. Some see a country that plans in decades and removes whoever fails. Others see a structure that has not yet passed its first serious stress test. Nobody has presented the data that would settle the debate, and it probably doesn't exist until the test arrives.