Their economy lifted a bunch of people out of poverty. That's positive.

However, in terms of 'democracy' they're still way worse off than the US right now, even if the US is headed in a bad direction.

> Their economy lifted a bunch of people out of poverty

This is fallacious as every economy that started at extreme poverty lifted a bunch of people out of poverty.

Unless we invent a time machine and do an A|B test we can't really attribute the success to policy when _any_ policy would have clearly lifted out a bunch of people out of poverty (basically almost impossible to not go up from extreme deficit). The closest we can do is look at similar scenarios like Taiwan which also lifted a bunch of people from poverty while retaining more human rights.