How can one country be an axis? Sorry, just musing there for a moment. Fulcrum of evil, possibly.
Anyway. China. Never been a democracy, or anything close to one really - scene of the bloodiest civil war* in history (and, shockingly, the second bloodiest war of any type in history, beating WW1 into *third* place), great cultural and scientific history and described by a friend of mine who spent several weeks there a few years ago as the Land of the Rising Phlegm.
What it isn't, any more, is remotely communist in deed and action - they're doing very nicely out of capitalism, which of course doesn't require democracy in order to function. So a totalitarian capitalist state, then, and one which is shortly going to have a large amount of control over all our lives (the balance of payments debt is getting rather scary, as are the price rises in steel and oil as a result of the explosion of the Chinese economy).
Thanks for the post, Chris. Found it very interesting.
[To pour more oil on troubled flames, Graham's right, there are plenty of countries with strong Daily Mail friendly social policies and none of them are remotely desirable as places to live.]
*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion - I recommend Flashman and the Dragon as a primer on it. It shows what happens when a lot of people are brainwashed by a loony who's inspired by a perverted form of a major monotheistic religion...oh, hang on a minute...