Second, proponents of the benign view of China’s rise argued that, almost inevitably, as China’s national wealth increased, so too would democracy. Nascent patterns of free elections, which observers saw in isolated local village elections in rural China, would spread to other locales, and then rise to the provincial level, and then finally to the national level. There was a strong correlation, they said, between the growth of economic freedom and the emergence of true middle classes, on the one hand, and political freedom and democracy on the other. Then, as China became more democratic, the
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