I would love to see a discussion between these Chinese American studies students and American Chinese studies students. I think the content of those conversations would be quite enlightening...
Democracy is a human rights value,Communism is an economic paradigm,Many people unable to tell the difference,the opposite of communism is capitalism,not democracy. And we have different understandings of democracy. Your understanding of democracy is that everyone chooses the right person according to his intuition. But the reality is that people's intuition is often wrong. Especially in the era of media flooding, people's views are easily misled. Our understanding of democracy is that a person should be good at doing things in his field. For example, as a mayor, if his city has the highest economic growth, the best environmental protection and the lowest unemployment rate in his state, then he should become a governor, just like the operation mechanism of big companies such as Google, apple and Amazon. This kind of automatic optimization mechanism, though not perfect,not people's own subjective consciousness to choose, but it is the interests of everyone to choose automatically. This is democracy. And I don't think it is any less than the intuitive choice of the West blinded by speeches and news, let alone that most people don't know the right choice. Please remember that the two world wars started in democratic countries by people s chose,I dont see apple or Google chose their CEO by your kind of democracy in any chance