I can’t know, so I choose not to decide one way or the other. I can’t know what is or isn’t propaganda, so I can’t tell you with full certainty.
I can know from firsthand accounts from Chinese people I know personally about the surveillance and militaristic state of things. I can know from reports from those on the ground.
However, I don’t think I’ve heard any worse about China than America, but I believe it to be more restrictive than the EU by a fair margin. Is China “bad”? To me, they aren’t “good” per-se, but moreover, China seems to only really care about China, as their actions seem to reflect.
They pay and support who they support and legitimize the same as any other large, powerful and untrustworthy nation, I give no quarter, but I impose none, all the same.
I think a lot of what I hear from western media is communism fear mongering propaganda. But I also think that there are kernels of truth in some of it. China is a large country that I have no doubt is doing a lot of good stuff and a lot of awful stuff. Just like the USA does good stuff and awful stuff.
What China is doing with the Uigurs is not merely Western propaganda. China is also obviously a dictatorship. No sane person would challenge that. The surveillance state is also hardening and Xi is aiming towards a neo-maoist trajectory in so some regards but without the stone age communism of the Cultural Revolution.
The West, especially but not only the US are moving towards a hardened dictatorship as well but that doesn’t change the situation in China.
All of that is quite distinct from the question if China is a benevolent dictatorship. I would say partially. Sadly a lot of what made China that is currently being dismantled. The previous safeguards of all the power consolidating in one individual have been broken. There are good reasons why those safeguards were previously created. So that development is troubling. Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. In those few cases where it doesn’t the reign can lead to a golden age. But if the guy at the top sucks it is incredibly hard to get rid of him (or her), much harder than in a democracy or even non absolute dictatorship.
The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people’s democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local government is directly elected, and then these governments elect people to higher rungs, meaning any candidate at the top level must have worked their way up from the bottom and directly proved themselves. Combining this consultative, ground-up democracy with top-down economic planning is the key to China’s success.
I highly recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. Socialist democracy has been imperfect, but has gone through a number of changes and adaptations over the years as we’ve learned more from testing theory to practice. Boer goes over the history behind socialist democracy in this textbook.
Xi Jinping is not a “neo-Maoist,” he’s a Marxist-Leninist, same as all of the leaders of the CPC since Mao.
Funny how you forgot to list the results on the question of “impact of elections” or the one about political pluralism. But in either case. Comparing those results between entirely different countries and systems of government is rather difficult to begin with. After all, this is about perceptions, not reality. It would be interesting to see how many people would agree with “My country is democratic” in North Korea.
The claim that ethnic Uyghurs have absolutely equal rights before the law compared to a Han Chinese living in Xinyiang is pretty detached from reality. But even if they had, that doesn’t mean that the law isn’t biased against them to begin with.
But the clearest indication is a >90% satisfaction of people with the federal government. Such country is either utopia, in a massive economic uprise … or not a democracy. China on a Beijing level has a “congress” that is functionally as meaningless as a legislative could be. It is so large that it is by design already pretty impossible to be a functional parliament, and anything but a rubber stamping institution. And so the records also show that it isn’t much more than that. Power is increasingly centralised in one person, de facto. There is not much left of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms on preventing power the concentration of too much into one single person. Xi has increasingly hollowed out the system of Collective Leadership. Naturally, elections or citizen’s opinions on any of that had very little impact on any of that.
This doesn’t actually bear out concretely in reality. The fact that the government has high approval rates is directly related to the consultative form of democracy practiced in China, and the nature of a socialist state as governed by the working classes. Western states see less support because they are dominated by a tiny minority, whereas China is led by the majority.
I can’t know, so I choose not to decide one way or the other. I can’t know what is or isn’t propaganda, so I can’t tell you with full certainty.
I can know from firsthand accounts from Chinese people I know personally about the surveillance and militaristic state of things. I can know from reports from those on the ground.
However, I don’t think I’ve heard any worse about China than America, but I believe it to be more restrictive than the EU by a fair margin. Is China “bad”? To me, they aren’t “good” per-se, but moreover, China seems to only really care about China, as their actions seem to reflect.
They pay and support who they support and legitimize the same as any other large, powerful and untrustworthy nation, I give no quarter, but I impose none, all the same.
I think a lot of what I hear from western media is communism fear mongering propaganda. But I also think that there are kernels of truth in some of it. China is a large country that I have no doubt is doing a lot of good stuff and a lot of awful stuff. Just like the USA does good stuff and awful stuff.
What China is doing with the Uigurs is not merely Western propaganda. China is also obviously a dictatorship. No sane person would challenge that. The surveillance state is also hardening and Xi is aiming towards a neo-maoist trajectory in so some regards but without the stone age communism of the Cultural Revolution.
The West, especially but not only the US are moving towards a hardened dictatorship as well but that doesn’t change the situation in China.
All of that is quite distinct from the question if China is a benevolent dictatorship. I would say partially. Sadly a lot of what made China that is currently being dismantled. The previous safeguards of all the power consolidating in one individual have been broken. There are good reasons why those safeguards were previously created. So that development is troubling. Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. In those few cases where it doesn’t the reign can lead to a golden age. But if the guy at the top sucks it is incredibly hard to get rid of him (or her), much harder than in a democracy or even non absolute dictatorship.
The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people’s democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local government is directly elected, and then these governments elect people to higher rungs, meaning any candidate at the top level must have worked their way up from the bottom and directly proved themselves. Combining this consultative, ground-up democracy with top-down economic planning is the key to China’s success.
I highly recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. Socialist democracy has been imperfect, but has gone through a number of changes and adaptations over the years as we’ve learned more from testing theory to practice. Boer goes over the history behind socialist democracy in this textbook.
Xi Jinping is not a “neo-Maoist,” he’s a Marxist-Leninist, same as all of the leaders of the CPC since Mao.
Funny how you forgot to list the results on the question of “impact of elections” or the one about political pluralism. But in either case. Comparing those results between entirely different countries and systems of government is rather difficult to begin with. After all, this is about perceptions, not reality. It would be interesting to see how many people would agree with “My country is democratic” in North Korea.
The claim that ethnic Uyghurs have absolutely equal rights before the law compared to a Han Chinese living in Xinyiang is pretty detached from reality. But even if they had, that doesn’t mean that the law isn’t biased against them to begin with.
But the clearest indication is a >90% satisfaction of people with the federal government. Such country is either utopia, in a massive economic uprise … or not a democracy. China on a Beijing level has a “congress” that is functionally as meaningless as a legislative could be. It is so large that it is by design already pretty impossible to be a functional parliament, and anything but a rubber stamping institution. And so the records also show that it isn’t much more than that. Power is increasingly centralised in one person, de facto. There is not much left of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms on preventing power the concentration of too much into one single person. Xi has increasingly hollowed out the system of Collective Leadership. Naturally, elections or citizen’s opinions on any of that had very little impact on any of that.
This doesn’t actually bear out concretely in reality. The fact that the government has high approval rates is directly related to the consultative form of democracy practiced in China, and the nature of a socialist state as governed by the working classes. Western states see less support because they are dominated by a tiny minority, whereas China is led by the majority.