I mean, the DPRK has gone from being bombed into the stone age by the US where the citizens literally lived in caves to avoid being hit with napalm to building amusement parks, nuclear weapons, and computers. You can’t actually achieve that with slave labor, this is well known. It requires intrinsic motivation, and I can think of no better intrinsic motivation than rebuilding my country from the ground up next to my neighbors in defiance of the brutal fascism of the West.
I get that it helps you to feel like a rebel to imagine that there are zero examples of successful alternatives to the West, but you end up supporting the narratives of fascist imperialists without narry a thought to how closely you are aligned with them. You wouldn’t be bothered at all if the US managed to destroy the DPRK, the PRC, Iran, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Laos. You’d think it serves them right for being fascists while the actual fascists were committing mass murder and consolidating their global dominance over 99% of the human population on the planet. And it would be OK, because you have the correct reasoning and proper liberatory line and one day, you will be out in the streets fighting that empire to build the first ever real attempt at liberation, without any hint of self awareness as the autonomous weapons systems hunt you down.
Who people can vote for is decided by the party, but that decision making process involved elections within the party. You are correct that there is not universal participation in the party in China due to the requirements of becoming a party member. There are 100M citizens in the party, which is a small percentage of the population.
This is where words matter. The system is, in fact, democratic, but governing power is not universal. This is true of all democracies all over the world, including Western ones. The question becomes one of the size and influence of the franchise, not a question of whether its democratic. The size of the party in China is small, and there are efforts underway to increase it They added 1M members to the party in 2024. That’s too little, but it is openly discussed and the party is clear that both they need to expand the party and they have to prevent disruption of the revolutionary government by outside forces. It is a delicate balance when only 70 years ago they were a peasant society undergoing a civil war in which the Western imperialists were invested. It’s made much more difficult by the subsequent years in which the US destroyed Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, trained and airlifted terrorists into Tibet, built a massive drug running operation through Thailand, etc.
However, the other question about democracy is whether the demos, the people, actually can change the policies of the state, the kratos. And as it turns out, the party is incredibly responsive to the people. That’s why the people approve of the work the party is doing - because the party listens to the people. As you say:
This isn’t really true in one-party systems. One-party systems have factions and the factions all fight for their program within the party. It’s a governed form of conflict, and it works because it doesn’t really afford for the sorts of manipulation that we see in the West. Factions have to fight for their platform according to rules of engagement, and the platforms that rise to the top are the ones that run the party. There is accountability at the platform level in these systems. Again, unlike in the West where it is very well understood that people will campaign on a platform and then not implement any of it and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
The joke is that in the US, you can change the party but cannot change the policies, while in China you can change the policies but cannot change the party. And the question is - which one is more democratic? Is it the country where the popular will of the people is what drives the policies or is it the country where the popular will of the people only drives which people inhabit offices but where the majority of people actually oppose the policies?
That’s not a theoretical question either. Research from Princeton shows that popular opinion does not matter at all in the US. Laws pass at the same rate whether they are popular or unpopular. They also shows that the primary determinant of a law passing is whether the top 1% of wealth holders approve of it. This is not true in China. The Harvard study that showed that 95% of Chinese citizens approve of their government is because it is responsive to their needs, which means they voice their opinion and their opinion is incorporated into policies.
The US outlawed the communist party, blacklisted every communist sympathizer they could find, killed black organizers, and has been oppressing viewpoints for a century, but because you can elect different parties, people think its a democracy.
As for Hong Kong, we can learn a lot about Chinese politics by examining it. The Hong Kong protests raged for weeks with protestors throwing fire bombs at police. That would never happen in the US because the US would brutally put such protests down very quickly. Chinese police, however, we given orders to disengage when things got too violent. Their role in Hong Kong was to prevent the protests from getting totally out of control, essentially to let the protestors express their anger for as long as they needed for it calm down and become more civil.
We can also learn a lot about it from the commentary of the citizens there. The people of Hong Kong that were protesting were a small minority and mostly in a specific age range between late teens and mid 30s. The elders were not protesting and in fact shunned many of their own young family members who protested. And the reason is because of the way Hong Kong “democracy” came about. Hong Kong was ripped away from China by the British as part of the British’s spoils from the Opium Wars. Brits in Hong Kong were immune to the law. They would abuse the residents without consequence, and the Chinese living there were living mean lives.
That changed when the Brits realized they would not be able to keep Hong Kong. As soon as they realized China was on the rise and intended to not renew their lease of the island, the first thing the Brits did was consider if they could force China to renew the lease by force, but the analysis was that this would be a bad idea. So instead, the Brits completely reformed Hong Kong and created a middle class, and elevated the most loyal servants of the Brits into bankers to give them huge salaries and bonuses, and they created a parliamentary democracy that they controlled and propagandized everyone through their control of the schools. And they did this specifically to make reintegration with China as hard as humanly possible.
And China knew this. And they knew they had to balance national security and the self-determination of the people of Hong Kong. They knew eventually they would come around to Chinese governance, but that they couldn’t force it. But they also knew that if they let Hong Kong be totally free it would be used as a launching point for Western terrorism and separatism, just like the Brits and Americans always do. So when China passed a law cementing the national security rules they felt were necessary, it sparked a protest, and it was couched in the language of “pro democracy” even though the Hong Kong governance structure was being left in place.
To me, that’s not totalitarianism. To me, that’s measured governance.
But these are two very different experiences. China is under siege, being surrounded by nuclear military bases. The US has no such threat. Similarly, the powers that be in the US do not listen to the people at all, and consistently have terrible approval ratings, whereas the Chinese government is constantly working on their process of listening to and addressing the needs of the people. The flaws are in no way equivalent.
We can have this discussion, but it’s very fraught. The reality is that Tibetans have their own autonomous state within China, they educate their children with the Tibetan language and their culture thrives, whereas in the US Indian reservations are horrible places where traditional religions are barely hobbling along and languages are dying because of the repression. Structurally, China is far better for multiculturalism than the US is. As for the death penalty, I disagree it’s contrary to democratic values. Democracies around the world and throughout history have had the death penalty and it didn’t make them undemocratic. China’s use of the death penalty to protect the public good from people who betray the public trust is sort of wonderful compared to the fact that we fine businessmen a few million when they kill a thousand people through deliberate negligence just to make some money.
At this point, you’re just smearing your words together. It sounds like you’re saying Totalitarian == Fascism == Authoritarian
That’s just not how I’ve seen these words get developed. Authoritarian is the systemic use of authority to achieve goals. America is more authoritarian than China - it imprisons more of its people, it uses violence against the entire world, and it even has official decrees from the president called executive orders. China, on the other hand, does not allow the president to issue unilateral executive orders, but instead requires all such decrees to go through the structures and processes of the party. It has fewer of its people in prison, and its prisons are focused on rehabilitation instead of authoritative retribution, as evidence by its very low recidivism rates. It also hasn’t dropped a bomb since 1989.
I’m out of space. But suffice to say these words aren’t equivalent, and nearly everything you can point to about China can be applied to the US, to the UK, etc, and often in worse ways. The systems are different, they have different shapes and manifestations, but China is not somehow obviously evil compared to the West.