China has democracy. Just not bourgeois liberal democracy. The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people’s democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local levels are directly elected, and then these representatives from around the country 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. Also due to the nature of things the vast majority of representatives are among those directly elected by the people. You should research things before you just say things. And we’re very happy with our system. Even Harvard puts the approval rating around 95%.
No, nominal western liberal democracy pretends to have that checklist (I could go into details on how there’s none of that in the West). functional democracy means that, regardless of the mechanisms, the results are what people want. In this way, China is a lot more democratic functionally than what we have in the west by all polls of satisfaction with policy.
Turns out that when you have a powerful minority capitalist class with diametrically opposed interests to those of the majority, the majority of policy is passed against our interests!
Correct. Which makes it strange that you ignored everything I explained in this reply to you and just went back to the same checklist again.
Functional democracy needs: Opposition
No. That is the liberal electoral model, not the universal definition of democracy. Democracy means political authority comes from the people and that they participate in governance.
China’s system does this through whole-process people’s democracy. People directly elect local People’s Congress deputies, those bodies elect higher congresses, and the system scales upward to the National People’s Congress. Most representatives come from those directly elected levels. Officials advance after years working through those layers.
It is a different institutional design. Pretending it does not exist because it is not your familiar Western party circus is not an argument.
Free media
Again you should read Michael Parenti on “inventing reality.” In the West media is not magically independent. It is owned by a tiny number of massive corporations and billionaires. Those owners decide what gets covered, what narratives dominate, and what perspectives disappear.
Calling that “free” while pretending ownership power does not shape information is extremely naive.
Open voting / Free elections
China holds direct elections at the grassroots level where the majority of representatives originate. Higher levels are elected by the bodies below them. Again, a hierarchical representative system instead of a national campaign spectacle.
Different design. Not absence.
Same law for everyone
This one is especially funny coming from systems where billionaires routinely dodge consequences while corporations treat fines as operating costs.
Civil liberties
China prioritizes social stability and development as core measures of legitimacy. Over forty years it lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty and massively expanded infrastructure, education, and living standards.
You may not like that model. Fine. But dismissing it with slogans while ignoring the outcomes is not serious.
As far as I’m aware
Yes, that part was obvious. Your entire argument is basically “it doesn’t look like my system therefore it isn’t democracy,” plus a “citation” from the eagle burger institute of goodness democracy index in your other comment made it abundantly clear.
My Chinese friends living in New Zealand as dual citizens are afraid to criticize the Chinese government even in private online conversations. That says a lot, I think.
It certainly does but mostly about them lmao. If you ever end up living in China you’ll come to realise criticizing and debating about the government is like the second most popular conversation topic. We love it, it’s almost a national pass time.
But do you do it in public, online or offline? What about protests? What about strikes?
Where are the independent news organizations and invitations to during media to prove to the world everything we think is wrong with the Converse government is a lie?
Yes, people discuss government policy in public and offline all the time. It’s a very normal topic of conversation. In practice, serious political discussion tends to happen face-to-face because that’s simply a better format for nuanced debate, but there is also plenty of discussion online. What generally gets censored online are calls for overthrowing the state, organizing mass unrest, or similar things. Many countries draw similar lines around incitement or destabilization.
Protests and strikes do occur, but they are usually local and issue-specific rather than ideological movements aimed at regime change. Labor disputes, land disputes, corruption complaints, etc. happen all the time and are often resolved through administrative or legal channels. The political culture tends to focus more on petitioning, negotiation, and internal pressure than on permanent protest movements.
On “independent” media: Independent from whom? In Western countries most major media outlets are owned by a very small number of large corporations or billionaires. Those owners influence what gets covered, what narratives dominate, and what perspectives are marginalized. Calling that system “independent” while ignoring ownership power is a very selective definition of independence.
The firewall was originally created to foster and protect China’s fledgling digital infrastructure and data sovereignty. That was a legitimate policy choice. Many countries regulate foreign platforms and data flows. China built its own ecosystem instead of depending on foreign companies. We have seen what happens when foreign platforms operate without local oversight: Facebook facilitating genocide in Myanmar, coordinated anti-vax disinformation campaigns in Southeast Asia, algorithm-driven radicalization. The firewall makes those kinds of external influence operations harder to run at scale.
I like many others here support the firewall even though it can be inconvenient (so long as vpns remain accessible and legal). I have seen the alternatives. The trade off makes sense to us.
“996” was never legal nor pervasive, and the state cracked down on it years ago. Western media will always make a mountain out of a molehill to maximally smear China, because the Cold War never ended.
996 seems like a concept copied from Korean and Japanese workplace culture. It would probably be fairer to look at some underlying common circumstances
It was a thing in ~40 of the big tech firms during the 2016-2019 tech boom, the supreme people’s court explicitly ruled it illegal in 2021 and with the 2025 consumption boost plan more frameworks for cracking down on excess overtime alongside enforcing rest and vacation rights better alongside many other things is being put in place.
Well for a start 996 is illegal so I don’t think I need to justify that.
And censorship can be annoying but is far less pervasive than you people imagine. The amount that is censored is probably on par with that of the western world, China is just open about where the lines are. Even then it’s entirely confined to the digital domain/media you can still talk about whatever you want which becomes very clear if you ever get a taxi lmao. Some amount of censorship is good anyway, fascists should be censored for example.
I’m sure the people of Tibet would much rather have continued living as barefoot slaves under a medieval theocracy of pedophile priests who tortured them, sexually abused them and made arts and crafts out of their body parts.
I can always tell when someone doesn’t know shit about Tibet beyond what they absorbed from 90s pop culture when their reflexive, programmed hatred for China leads them to side with the absolute nightmare kingdom that the PLA liberated people from. If you would have a problem with Mormons taking over all of America and imposing brutal Deseret Law on millions of people, then boy do I have some fucking news for you about Old Tibet.
Their were excesses during the ETIM crackdown no doubt, however much of those have since been rectified and the crackdown was unfortunately necessary. The crackdown was also far more humane and reasonable in response to the terrorism in comparison to the western world that spent decades killing hundreds of thousands to over a million innocents in the middle east (not to mention Abu gharib, Guantanamo and the other black sites).
Tibetan serfs and slaves requested the PLA’s help in overthrowing their violent theocratic slave state.
Do you support the reunification of Ireland? Do you support the reunification of Korea (who reunified with who being irrelevant)? Are you a supporter of the American confederacy? Why should China not be allowed to finish it’s civil war? Also invasion is the last resort, peaceful reunification is the ideal.
A violent clash between police and protesters (who started the violence) over 35 years ago makes China awful? Certainly an interesting perspective.
Liberation of British-colonized Tibet, run by a local theocrat that enslaved most of its people and by enslaved I mean they had officially been designated as serfs to the state, as human property of the clergy, by law.
You can’t annex your own country, but what you can do is support an expelled far-right party of a country that kills the indigenous people of an island and pretend that these murderers are somehow the victims.
The Tiananmen square insurgency was a CIA-backed coup attempt where the insurgents murdered 100+ Chinese army choir soldiers that were on their way to the square to sing out the protesters off the square.
The biggest media censorship machine on earth has failed to hide a genocide in Gaza (that you people screamed we had to vote for) and lied about it for years, but somehow that same Epstein media machine is totally telling the truth about an invisible bloodless genocide in China. Evidence means nothing to you white supremacists, only imperial loyalty.
By the way, do you deny the ethnic cleansing of eastern Ukraine by the nazi junta government?
I’m pretty sure virtually all of the Tibetan people are happy to no longer be suffering under theocratic feudalism. Happy to no longer be illiterate serfs and slaves living in depredation under a god-king. I doubt many of them are sad that CIA asset Dalai “suck my tongue” Lama is in exile.[1]
The US tried to foment division in China by funding and organizing terrorist cells in Xinjiang, and once those efforts failed, it concocted and promoted a genocide narrative. Antony Blinken is still pushing this slop, just a few weeks ago.
We see here for example the evolution of public opinion in regards to China. In 2019, the ‘Uyghur genocide’ was broken by the media (Buzzfeed, of all outlets). In this story, we saw the machine I described up until now move in real time. Suddenly, newspapers, TV, websites were all flooded with stories about the ‘genocide’, all day, every day. People whom we’d never heard of before were brought in as experts — Adrian Zenz, to name just one; a man who does not even speak a word of Chinese.
Organizations were suddenly becoming very active and important. The World Uyghur Congress, a very serious-sounding NGO, is actually an NED Front operating out of Germany […]. From their official website, they declare themselves to be the sole legitimate representative of all Uyghurs — presumably not having asked Uyghurs in Xinjiang what they thought about that.
The WUC also has ties to the Grey Wolves, a fascist paramilitary group in Turkey, through the father of their founder, Isa Yusuf Alptekin.
Documents came out from NGOs to further legitimize the media reporting. This is how a report from the very professional-sounding China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) came to exist. They claimed ‘up to 1.3 million’ Uyghurs were imprisoned in camps. What they didn’t say was how they got this number: they interviewed a total of 10 people from rural Xinjiang and asked them to estimate how many people might have been taken away. They then extrapolated the guesstimates they got and arrived at the 1.3 million figure.
Sanctions were enacted against China — Xinjiang cotton for example had trouble finding buyers after Western companies were pressured into boycotting it. Instead of helping fight against the purported genocide, this act actually made life more difficult for the people of Xinjiang who depend on this trade for their livelihood (as we all do depend on our skills to make a livelihood).
Any attempt China made to defend itself was met with more suspicion. They invited a UN delegation which was blocked by the US. The delegation eventually made it there, but three years later. The Arab League also visited Xinjiang and actually commended China on their policies — aimed at reducing terrorism through education and social integration, not through bombing like we tend to do in the West.
Ohh, so I get to pick which awful country is better? Cool choices.
Edit: aaaaaaand the tankies show up.
You’re in our house, dummy.
Why do you think China is awful?
Fire ass name btw
Thank you Comrade Sharkfucker 🫡
Because it’s not a democracy
China has democracy. Just not bourgeois liberal democracy. The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people’s democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local levels are directly elected, and then these representatives from around the country 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. Also due to the nature of things the vast majority of representatives are among those directly elected by the people. You should research things before you just say things. And we’re very happy with our system. Even Harvard puts the approval rating around 95%.
Perception != reality
Functional democracy needs those things:
As far as I’m aware, China doesn’t have any of those things.
No, nominal western liberal democracy pretends to have that checklist (I could go into details on how there’s none of that in the West). functional democracy means that, regardless of the mechanisms, the results are what people want. In this way, China is a lot more democratic functionally than what we have in the west by all polls of satisfaction with policy.
Turns out that when you have a powerful minority capitalist class with diametrically opposed interests to those of the majority, the majority of policy is passed against our interests!
Unless it’s your perception, of course
Correct. Which makes it strange that you ignored everything I explained in this reply to you and just went back to the same checklist again.
No. That is the liberal electoral model, not the universal definition of democracy. Democracy means political authority comes from the people and that they participate in governance.
China’s system does this through whole-process people’s democracy. People directly elect local People’s Congress deputies, those bodies elect higher congresses, and the system scales upward to the National People’s Congress. Most representatives come from those directly elected levels. Officials advance after years working through those layers.
It is a different institutional design. Pretending it does not exist because it is not your familiar Western party circus is not an argument.
Again you should read Michael Parenti on “inventing reality.” In the West media is not magically independent. It is owned by a tiny number of massive corporations and billionaires. Those owners decide what gets covered, what narratives dominate, and what perspectives disappear.
Calling that “free” while pretending ownership power does not shape information is extremely naive.
China holds direct elections at the grassroots level where the majority of representatives originate. Higher levels are elected by the bodies below them. Again, a hierarchical representative system instead of a national campaign spectacle.
Different design. Not absence.
This one is especially funny coming from systems where billionaires routinely dodge consequences while corporations treat fines as operating costs.
China prioritizes social stability and development as core measures of legitimacy. Over forty years it lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty and massively expanded infrastructure, education, and living standards.
You may not like that model. Fine. But dismissing it with slogans while ignoring the outcomes is not serious.
Yes, that part was obvious. Your entire argument is basically “it doesn’t look like my system therefore it isn’t democracy,” plus a “citation” from the eagle burger institute of goodness democracy index in your other comment made it abundantly clear.
Your awareness is painfully inadequate
My Chinese friends living in New Zealand as dual citizens are afraid to criticize the Chinese government even in private online conversations. That says a lot, I think.
And my aunt living in alabama is scared of muslim inflltrators, sometimes people worry about things that are fictional and/or unfathomably stupid
You’re right that’s a thing, it isn’t that.
It is exactly that
It certainly does but mostly about them lmao. If you ever end up living in China you’ll come to realise criticizing and debating about the government is like the second most popular conversation topic. We love it, it’s almost a national pass time.
But do you do it in public, online or offline? What about protests? What about strikes?
Where are the independent news organizations and invitations to during media to prove to the world everything we think is wrong with the Converse government is a lie?
Why the great firewall of China?
Yes, people discuss government policy in public and offline all the time. It’s a very normal topic of conversation. In practice, serious political discussion tends to happen face-to-face because that’s simply a better format for nuanced debate, but there is also plenty of discussion online. What generally gets censored online are calls for overthrowing the state, organizing mass unrest, or similar things. Many countries draw similar lines around incitement or destabilization.
Protests and strikes do occur, but they are usually local and issue-specific rather than ideological movements aimed at regime change. Labor disputes, land disputes, corruption complaints, etc. happen all the time and are often resolved through administrative or legal channels. The political culture tends to focus more on petitioning, negotiation, and internal pressure than on permanent protest movements.
On “independent” media: Independent from whom? In Western countries most major media outlets are owned by a very small number of large corporations or billionaires. Those owners influence what gets covered, what narratives dominate, and what perspectives are marginalized. Calling that system “independent” while ignoring ownership power is a very selective definition of independence.
The firewall was originally created to foster and protect China’s fledgling digital infrastructure and data sovereignty. That was a legitimate policy choice. Many countries regulate foreign platforms and data flows. China built its own ecosystem instead of depending on foreign companies. We have seen what happens when foreign platforms operate without local oversight: Facebook facilitating genocide in Myanmar, coordinated anti-vax disinformation campaigns in Southeast Asia, algorithm-driven radicalization. The firewall makes those kinds of external influence operations harder to run at scale.
I like many others here support the firewall even though it can be inconvenient (so long as vpns remain accessible and legal). I have seen the alternatives. The trade off makes sense to us.
How do you justify all the censorship and working 996 for an example?
Previously:
“996” was never legal nor pervasive, and the state cracked down on it years ago. Western media will always make a mountain out of a molehill to maximally smear China, because the Cold War never ended.
996 seems like a concept copied from Korean and Japanese workplace culture. It would probably be fairer to look at some underlying common circumstances
It was a thing in ~40 of the big tech firms during the 2016-2019 tech boom, the supreme people’s court explicitly ruled it illegal in 2021 and with the 2025 consumption boost plan more frameworks for cracking down on excess overtime alongside enforcing rest and vacation rights better alongside many other things is being put in place.
Thank you for answering. I will take a look at your claims.
Well for a start 996 is illegal so I don’t think I need to justify that.
And censorship can be annoying but is far less pervasive than you people imagine. The amount that is censored is probably on par with that of the western world, China is just open about where the lines are. Even then it’s entirely confined to the digital domain/media you can still talk about whatever you want which becomes very clear if you ever get a taxi lmao. Some amount of censorship is good anyway, fascists should be censored for example.
While I don’t posit that China is uniquely awful here are some low lights:
Yes, go on, because it seems like you’re losing steam and I’m calling your bluff
I’m sure the people of Tibet would much rather have continued living as barefoot slaves under a medieval theocracy of pedophile priests who tortured them, sexually abused them and made arts and crafts out of their body parts.
CW Insane Leatherface-type Horror Shit, including a flayed toddler skin: https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/tvs5pj/remembering_tibet_here_and_there_warning_graphic/
I can always tell when someone doesn’t know shit about Tibet beyond what they absorbed from 90s pop culture when their reflexive, programmed hatred for China leads them to side with the absolute nightmare kingdom that the PLA liberated people from. If you would have a problem with Mormons taking over all of America and imposing brutal Deseret Law on millions of people, then boy do I have some fucking news for you about Old Tibet.
Fuck the overlords, fuck the llamas
Now look up “Taiwan White Terror”.
Their were excesses during the ETIM crackdown no doubt, however much of those have since been rectified and the crackdown was unfortunately necessary. The crackdown was also far more humane and reasonable in response to the terrorism in comparison to the western world that spent decades killing hundreds of thousands to over a million innocents in the middle east (not to mention Abu gharib, Guantanamo and the other black sites).
Tibetan serfs and slaves requested the PLA’s help in overthrowing their violent theocratic slave state.
Do you support the reunification of Ireland? Do you support the reunification of Korea (who reunified with who being irrelevant)? Are you a supporter of the American confederacy? Why should China not be allowed to finish it’s civil war? Also invasion is the last resort, peaceful reunification is the ideal.
A violent clash between police and protesters (who started the violence) over 35 years ago makes China awful? Certainly an interesting perspective.
Go on…
Oh wow more authoritarian genocide denialists. You’re either really scummy or really brainwashed.
Removed by mod
The biggest media censorship machine on earth has failed to hide a genocide in Gaza (that you people screamed we had to vote for) and lied about it for years, but somehow that same Epstein media machine is totally telling the truth about an invisible bloodless genocide in China. Evidence means nothing to you white supremacists, only imperial loyalty.
By the way, do you deny the ethnic cleansing of eastern Ukraine by the nazi junta government?
You’re the 573rd person to point these out to us. You can go on, but we’ve heard them all before.
Previously:
Previously:
Previously: