I don't think China's growth has much to do with their 'iron fist governing', but more with the fact that:<p>1) things change ever more rapidly, and it's easier for one country to go from point A to point B than it was for another 50 years ago. For example, many African countries won't just have a repeat of setting up landline and cable infrastructure - they'll move straight to wireless. This allows their economy to move faster than it did for other countries long ago.<p>2) Due to it having many poor people willing to work for nothing, China became a paradise for manufacturing. We saw this happen in other countries, too, such as Eastern European countries. However, due to its size and sheer number of workers, China automatically won by default among all the other poor countries.<p>There are other factors like these that helped China grow fast, and neither of them have much to do with China not being a democracy.<p>That being said, it's true that democracy is starting to suffer worldwide, mainly because those at the top have learned how to "game it", and have formed a network of such people that know how to keep themselves in power without doing much of anything for the people while profiting as much as possible from their positions.<p>Personally, I said the current "representative democracy" as a failure. First off, there are different forms of representative democracies worldwide, and some are better than others. The ones that make the election process and the people's decision look most as a sham, are the ones that don't function very well.<p>US for example has one of the best Constitutions, but it has a piss poor election system, which leads it to elect such poor people, that lately aren't even paying much attention to that top-notch Constitution.<p>Right now, in most of these democracies, the people have very little say in how decisions are made. I'm not arguing for direct democracy necessarily, but I do think we need a lot more direct democracy <i>influences</i> injected into the representative democracies we have now. We need to let people create laws themselves, and then give them up for vote in the Parliament/Congress. We need to let people veto, or at least force the bill into another process, that perhaps needs to be approved by the judiciary, too.<p>We need more systems like these that give people a voice - a <i>real</i> voice in how decisions are made, instead of electing a few hundred people every few years, and then letting them do whatever they want. I don't think that's good enough for the 21st century. We need something that is a lot more "real-time", something that makes it so decisions are a lot more inline with what the people want. The problem is not many governments and Parliaments will be too eager to do this, or change their election systems to be more fair to 3rd parties, etc.