China’s fate will depend on the economic process From Josep Colomer,

Sir, Professor Stephen J Kobrin’s two questions (Letters, March 2) on the relations between capitalism and democracy have a clear negative answer. First, a capitalist economic system does not require democratic politics; we have known this not only since the 1930s but since much earlier times, as capitalism came in much before democracy. Second, capitalism does not inevitably lead to democracy; it may do so only in situations of economic crisis when making an authoritarian government responsible for its failure may require a replacement of the regime. Most currently existing democracies in the world have been established in the past 40 years, when capitalism was already widely spread, and most of their predecessor authoritarian regimes fell in periods of economic crisis. That the recent Great Recession has not produced a net gain in the number of democracies may be due to the fact that the crisis affected mostly countries with democratic regimes, while authoritarian ones such as China, have largely remained out of recession. The fate of authoritarian China will arrive when and if the economic process in the country derails.