Following Wednesday’s virtual exchange with the students in Hong Kong I would like to take a moment to reflect on what was said. There was many shared opinions regarding the necessity of democracy to hold a government accountable. For the most part both sides felt that democratic elections were important for government accountability but are not the only or even most effective way to hold governments accountable to their citizens. There was one group who did state that they did not feel that elections were necessarily useful in holding governments accountable and accountability can very easily be achieved without democratic elections. They supported their stance using the dictatorship in Singapore which is very in tune with the needs of its populous and discounted the necessity of democratic elections using failed democratic systems in Greece and Thailand. This is a problematic method of research by comparing the best case scenario of authoritarianism and the worst cases of democracy cannot truly by comparable. The main complaint of many of the students was about the election of the chief executive in 2017 that there will be free elections in Hong Kong but the candidates for the election will be chosen by the PRC. This seems like a very foreign idea but the point must be made that the republican candidate for the Governor of Virginia was not chosen by the populous by instead by a committee within the party itself.  This trend should be watched to preserve the American democratic system.