Comment by piker
11 hours ago
I'm not sure why you think I can't read Chinese, but Xi has been in power for 12 years and as far as I am aware cannot be removed by anyone other than the CCP. Please correct me if I'm wrong. If the people whom he governs can remove him by some kind of democratic process, then perhaps your points are valid. My understanding is that they cannot.
> Socialist democracy must, therefore, be seen as a historic, multi-generational and dialectical process by which conditions that enable increasing parts of society to play an active role in governance are created, nurtured, and defended. China has advanced on this path further than most societies in modern history. From early experiments in village-level organization to building a nationwide process for 1.4 billion people from 56 ethnic groups across a country spanning over nine million square kilometers, this process has come to be contained in a concept called “whole-process people’s democracy” — a practice of democratic governance built on over a century of organizational experience.
This (and the rest of this article) is nonsense propaganda if the above is correct.
There are 100 million members of the party, and these people vote directly for their local representatives, who then go onto vote for the village, town, city, province, etc representatives, all the way up to the Standing Committee which includes Xi. There are 3000 members of the National People's Congress that directly selects the Standing Committee. In rural areas or special administrative provinces, often anyone can vote, including union members who aren't officially party members. Comparatively, in the 2024 US election, 150 million people voted. So there's roughly the same amount of votes happening.
Maybe you don't agree that not being able to pick the head of state is not a valid definition of democracy. In that case I'd argue that having a twice-indicted convicted felon is not valid democracy either. In any case, feel free to keep your version.
Existence of elections does not mean a democratic process. Soviet Union had elections as well.
Existence of elections does not mean a democratic process. United States of America has elections as well.
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The argument you will hear from Americans and Europeans is that in order for it to be a "democracy" that anybody has to be able to vote. This is, of course, hypocritical because not a single one of those countries allows everyone to vote. And, just like China, every one of those countries has powerful government officials that are appointed by other government officials rather than elected by the public. And in many of them there is a parliamentary system where the public does not get to vote on the head of state, but rather the head of state is elected by the parliament.
In fact, the US republic at its beginning was more similar to China. The president and Senate were elected by the state legislatures, not the public.
Yes, democracy includes the right for the people to elect a convicted felon. We do not agree on a definition of the democracy. Your usage continues to undermine your original valid point.
These statements about numbers are meaningless to make the case that democracy exists in the PRC. There's 1 billion people there, comparison of vote counts to smaller countries doesn't make sense.
Party membership comes with 關係. It's not really about having the right to vote. Some people just join during school.
The PRC gets many things right but we should be honest about its flaws. The truth is the CPC, and especially now Xi (you HAVE seen the updated textbooks about father/brother xi, right?), are single points of failure and unchallengeable authority. What happened to the left communists in the PRC? What happened to the smaller unions that didn't toe the party line, and not in the direction of capitalism but deeper into leftism? Where are the Chinese anarchists? Hell, where are the Chinese communists?
The only path forward to a communist PRC is a split into province level states or better yet smaller entities. It's only a matter of time before Xi goes senile or has a big birthday he wants to celebrate by escalating imperialism into military intervention and tanks the entire PRC economy in doing so, or simply dies and kicks off a shitstorm power struggle that cripples the CPC and the country along with it.