You gave two conditions for reunification that would satisfy you. I explained why both conditions are unworkable from the perspective of people here, myself included.

Also, directly electing the head of state doesn’t really mean very much. Sure the US president isn’t quite elected by popular vote, but with only a few exceptions (admittedly, historically significant ones), the winner has won both the popular and electoral votes. Biden, for example, won both in 2020. And yet shit still fucking sucks here, and ordinary people have absolutely no say in government. As such, I would argue that simple popular voting for an executive falls far short of a good standard for democracy.

By contrast, in China, yes, President Xi can continue as long as the Party wants him to. Is that so bad? Don’t you think the CPC would turn against President Xi if some scandal occurred that turned most of the Chinese people against him? Couldn’t his long tenure simply be the result of significant popularity (perhaps owing to his apparently fairly successful efforts to root out corruption)? Was it really so bad that FDR got four terms in the US presidency? (The answer to this last one is a resounding ‘no,’ by the way, in case you’re not well-versed on US history.)

Then there’s the reasoning behind the somewhat-less-open forms of democratic government employed in socialist countries like China and Vietnam (called “democratic centralism”): if they loosened their grip on power, the US and other Westerners would seek to do to the CPC and its leaders the same thing they did to Mossadegh’s government in Iran in 1953, to Allende’s government in Chile in 1973, to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s, to Thomas Sankara’s government in Burkina Faso in 1987: kill them, destroy their government, and undermine all of the goals they worked for by allowing Western multinationals to move in and exploit people and resources to the maximum degree possible. It happens consistently to every socialist power that tries to play by the rules of Western Democracy. Did you think they were advocating this stuff out of the goodness of their hearts? No, it’s an ideology designed to allow maximal profit to capital.

As for your source, this is where Western lies and propaganda come in big-time. We have a meme here on Hexbear, “the same map,” which we roll out every time there’s an odious, right-wing Western source (and The Economist very much qualifies; it has a proud history that includes arguing in favor of slavery in the US during the Antebellum and Civil War eras) that puts out a map showing all the typical Western countries as “good” (by whatever BS metric the map supposedly indicates via color-coding, in this case “democracy”), and all the usual suspects as “bad.” I could go to the trouble of digging into the methodology used here and point out the many ways in which it’s flawed, but honestly I don’t really feel the need to do so; nothing The Economist says is worth so much as the paper it’s printed on.

Do you genuinely think that Saudi Arabia is more democratic than China is? That map is absolutely ridiculous and laughable

Anyways, in my mind, a real, functioning democracy is where people can directly elect their head of state, which is usually the president

this is such a deficient view of democracy that it doesn’t even qualify as democracy in my book. the word means rule by the masses - in what way does electing a head of state, someone who is in no way obligated to respect the wishes of the electorate (cf US presidents and their inability to push legislation/policy supported by supermajorities of the electorate) constitute rule by the masses. merely electing someone passes the buck on from the masses onto singular, corruptible individuals. democracy means the democratic participation of the people in government and such a thing goes so much farther than mere elections for representative. compare Cuban democracy, where elected representatives are required to hold weekly, local office hours so constituents can come share their thoughts about policy and governance, to western “democracy” where most people have no clue who their elected officials even are or what policy decisions their representatives are taking.

dream bigger. you’re setting a very narrow horizon on human possibilities in the sociopolitical realm.