Hi I agree with a lot of what you say and thank you for your insights. However, as someone who has seen and experienced authoritarianism in the West and never in China, I take exception to your comment on needing to address authoritarianism in China. We regularly see police brutality in the West but never have I seen any equivalent brutality in China. If China censors social media, it is almost always to restrict prejudicial content, not reasoned discussion in policy matters. Whereas the West expressly censors debate about the Zionism and the British government even tells the media not to discuss certain topics at all. If China comes across as “authoritarian” it’s because capitalists do not set policy in China the way they freely do in the West. Also, the CIA and the British MI6 (and who knows what other Western and Israeli secret service do) think nothing of destabilising other societies, forcing non-Western governments to restrict protests instigated or encouraged by the CIA front known as the National Endowment for Democracy.
If you have not personally experienced authoritarianism in the West, I respectfully suggest that it’s because you are male and white. Think about this before you pontificate about authoritarianism in China.
To be clear, there are genuine areas where China could do better. For example, I wish Chinese censorship were subject to review by a “media tribunal”, so censorship comes across as less arbitrary. But please don’t propagate prejudicial attitudes about China!
I am ethnic Chinese yes and male. But I am a Malaysian Chinese or Chinese Malaysian and just going by my limited experience of living in China. Maybe if I were female and some other ethnicity would I feel differently? Perhaps. But I stand by my claim that there is so much more authoritarianism in the US than in China. Just think of police violence and how police in Europe put down demonstrations in Europe. It’s violent. But even HK police did not resort to the violence that American and French police used against demonstrators.
“Authoritarianism is a form of government and social organization characterized by the concentration of power in a single leader or a small elite, the restriction of political pluralism, and the suppression of civil liberties.”
By this definition of authoritarianism, I dare say you need to be an olympic champion in mental gymnastics to conclude that China is less authoritarian than any Western country. If you mean that authorities in Western countries are somehow more violent than Chinese authorities, that could perhaps be debated, but I don’t really understand what data or information you base that on. Even then, the repressive apparatus in China is there so that they won’t need to use violence against their population. Does that make the repressive apparatus good? Isn’t repression a sort of “violence” in itself?
I think a lot of the differences in views depends on deep philosophical worldviews -- dualism vs pragmatism. The definition of authoritarianism that you cite is fundamentally dualist. You presuppose a certain criteria for "liberalism", and whatever falls short becomes labelled as authoritarian.
On the other hand, the Chinese people are deeply pragmatic. I'm not just saying that this is "consequentialism". It's deeper than that. Chinese worldview does not have the kind of dualism that is deeply rooted in Christianity and the social contract approach to political legitimacy in the West. Chinese worldview is deeply pragmatic, political legitimacy rests on the people's wellbeing. It's not a recent communist thing, it goes all the way back to Confucius.
But the Chinese system is very difficult for a Westerner to understand if they don't first sort out the difference between dualism vs pragmatism. BTW, Chinese pragmatism is actually very similar (if not the same) as American pragmatism of the type pioneered by John Dewey, Hilary Putnam, etc. But in truth, China (like in so many things) anticipated American pragmatism. The Chinese got there first!
Thanks for the link and your thoughtful reply. I think I understand what you are saying, and I think what you are saying does make sense, but I also think, respectfully, that it does not quite penetrate to the heart of the matter, if what we are talking about is the definition of China's political system.
I don't know if you have read about WB Gallie's "Essentially contested concepts"[1]? The term is pretty self-explanatory, and let's just say he lists "democracy" as one of them. The modern representative political systems of today that are conventionally called "democracies" would NOT have qualified as "democracies" to the ancient Athenians - the "original democrats". But the meanings of words change over time, and in that sense it is(/can) not "wrong" to call China a democracy. It is, in the language of semiotics, a "floating signifier". What I would say, however, is that (1) Calling China a democracy today strips the word of its analytical usefulness, that (2) calling China a democracy is really a conflation of terms that (2a) has historical roots, but also, I would argue, (2b) a conflation of terms very deliberately upheld by the Chinese Communist Party with the aim of legitimizing itself.
So on the one hand, "democracy" is an essentially contested concept and "floating signifier" that is not, and perhaps will never be, completely agreed upon. Indeed, you don't need to go to China to find these disagreements over its meaning. There's the Schumpeterian minimalist view of democracy, there's Robert Dahl's maximalist view (he prefers the word "polyarchies" for those countries that we conventionally think of as "democracies" in the west, as he doesn't believe there is a country in the world that really fulfills the democratic criteria). But there are still some universal analytical criteria that all these definitions share, and China does not fulfil them, not even the minimalist definition, and not even close.
So there is this "essentially contested concept" perspective that you can adopt, and then there is an academic analytical defintion of what a "democracy" is. And what I argue is that, if you call China a democracy, you have to really redefine what it even means to be a democracy. And here's where we come to point number (2): Democracy is ultimately a Greek word, that has traveled down to modern European languages, and then been exported to China and other "foreign civilizations" where it has been translated and acquired its own meaning, with connotations and nuances that made sense to those cultures. Lei Guang has an excellent article on the matter[2]. He talks about how democracy is usually translated as minzhu in Chinese, but that there is also the closely related term "minben" for instance. And then there is the Marxist-Leninist usage of the word too, which certainly conflicts with the modern "liberal" definition, as you would have it. But the point is, the word "democracy" is not Chinese to begin with (nor English for that matter), and (as with English), it has come to be infused with its own particular connotations (Confucian in the case of China, but also later Leninist). So ultimately, when the word enter the Chinese sphere of discourse, it already meant something slightly different, and there are also these internal disagreements and contests about what it should mean in China, just like in the West. So when we hear talk about "democracy" from a Chinese (official) perspective, we have to consider it a (re)translation of the Chinese term, rather than the same "democracy" that we think of in the West. It's two different things in that sense. Related... but different.
Then there is (2b): Democracy just has a good ring to it. We live in a globalized world where English has gained this status of global lingua franca almost, and with it has come the values already imbued in the English words. So "democracy" is associated with "good". So to legitimize themselves, the CCP can't really call themselves "authoritarian", because that is the antithesis of "democracy", and hence of "good" (this is perhaps the "dualism" you referred to?). So, while you could say that it is disingenuous when you hear CCP officials talk about "whole-process democracy" (and it is disingenuous), you can also ask yourself, what would you do if you were them? There could be alternative ways of defining the Chinese political system, but ultimately being a "democracy" is a sign of status in today's "international society". Maybe in the future there will be room for alternatives status-wise, but for now it makes sense for the CPC to try to "hijack" the term. And even if I argue that, in intent, it is a form of hijacking from their part, I don't dismiss discussion about what democracy means, should mean, and could mean, in different contexts, because again, words are words. In sum, I don't think you're wrong, but I argue that when you talk about "democracy" in the context of China, it is a conflation of terms (in an analytical sense). What you are actually talking about is "good governance", or "accountable government". You could also simply be using the word in a Chinese sense, but then I argue that it is a translation of a Chinese concept into "democracy", and it is really not a very good translation, analytically speaking.
Hope I didn't forget anything and that I got my point through. And thank you again for the engagement. Best regards.
Hi, thank you. It seems you have something that I can learn from. But let me share with you my own personal journey. First, while I'm ethnic Chinese, I have a largely Western upbringing. I also grew up in a Christian family, and still attend church regularly. In many ways, I think I know more about Western philosophy, Western traditions and Western culture than many average Westerners do, while at the same time by knowledge of Chinese philosophy, traditions and culture is abysmal.
On the idea of democracy being a contested term, my journey really began with Amarty Sen's work on "The Idea of Justice" and many of his other works (e.g., The possibility of social choice, Development as Freedom, etc) and it is Sen who has deeply influenced my own thinking about democracy.
I am not sure whether Sen would call China a democracy, but at various points in his work, he argues that we value democracy because we value having a say in social choice. (Sen is one of the leading scholars of social choice theory, and his work in this area likely contributed to Sen being awarded the Nobel prize for economics.) Also, in The Idea of Justice, Sen contrasts two approaches to justice: (1) a transcendental, institutions based approach exemplified by the social contractarian approach of Locke, Rousseau and John Rawls, and (2) a comparative pragmatic approach in which Sen actually regards both Adam Smith and Karl Marx as exemplars.
It led me to think about what "democracy" really means. Like most Westerners, I started from the position that democracy is about elections. But that is really a transcendent, institutional based approach to democracy, which defines democracy in terms of a set of specific (typically Western liberal) institutions. Whereas taking the comparative pragmatic approach, democracy is (I argue) about every person having a broadly equal say in social choice.
In the Nicomadean Ethics, Aristotle famously observed that wealth is not something we value for its own sake, but for the same of something else (or words to that effect). Similarly, democracy in a procedural sense is not something we value for its own sake, but for the sake of something else. What we really value about democracy is that every one (regardless of social status, wealth, ethnicity, gender, etc) have a broadly equal say in social choice. Many different kinds of institutions (including I submit the Chinese Communist political institution) can achieve (or at least approximate) this ideal where we all have an equal say in social choice.
It will not take you or I long to realise that the Western political system doesn't actually ensure everyone has an equal say in social choice. The "bourgeoise" tends to dominate, and the wealthy have a disproportionate influence on government. Especially in America where political campaigns are now so expensive that politicians are beholden to wealthy supporters.
Whereas the Chinese political system is not beholden to capitalists. The reason why China's political system comes across as "authoritarian" is because rich people don't get to dictate terms to the Chinese government. You might not yet have realised this, but the rich and wealthy among us tend to have relatively fragile personalities. They get very easily offended if they don't get their way. I learnt this long ago working for an anti-trust regulator trying to control monopolies and abuses of market power. The wealthy don't appreciate being told they cannot acquire market power or use their market power to raise prices!
It is not just an issue of terminology, and incidentally, the very approach of appealing to established terminology to distinguish "democracies" from other political system is a transcendental, institutions based approach to democracy. But if we are willing to take a pragmatic comparative approach, China's credentials as a democracy is not bad! It's not perfect, but rich people in China don't get to have more say than the poor!
I think another complication is many people are pessimistic about the idea that everyone can have a say on social choice (as in ancient Athens, at least among its male citizens). In fairness, for much of humanity's experience living in social groups, giving everyone an equal say in social choice has always been an ideal that is difficult to live up to. But many different traditions do have that ideal. I suspect that some African villages probably even practice democracy that way. We all value having a say in social choice.
But the good news is that with the social media, universal education, general public health, the ideal of everyone having an equal say in social choice is within reach. What we need is an institution that is committed to engaging with all sectors of society, whether rich and poor. And on that, the Chinese political institution performs well, and I would argue, better than the American political institution. Do politicians in America pay as much attention to what the proleteriat wants as they do to what the bourgeoise wants? I think you know the answer.
China's democracy is not perfect, but taking a comparative pragmatic approach, one can reasonably say that China's democracy is better and healthier than America's, at least today. It was not always thus. There was a time when democracy in America, Australia, etc really worked well. Politicians were committed to governing in the public interest. But democracy is in a crisis in much of the West today because Western politicans have become so partisan.
China's traditions (going back to imperial China) has always viewed factions and rivalry with suspicion. And modern China today values harmony over rivalry. It's not an unreasonable position. Most people don't realise that China is actually a mutli-party democracy, but all political parties in China work together under the United Front, a department that seeks to ensure political parties have representation at the People's Congress. Is rivalry at the electoral box so essential to democracy? It depends on one's philosophical world view.
BTW, may I invite you to subscribe to my Substack journal: "The possibility of democratic choice". It's inspired by Amartya Sen's work, including his book "The possibility of social choice". I generally post a short article every day, exploring one specific idea. I group my articles together under a "Contents Page", and move on to a different but related theme. Perhaps you can help me by reading and commenting on my posts?
I don't claim to be an expert on the topics I discuss. What I try to do is to present the arguments, and I usually base my arguments on academic literature. My bet is that in the not too distant future, China's status as a democracy will be firmly established and recognised world wide. Perhaps not in the West, but in the Global South. And that is not a bad thing if it means the proleteriat in the Global South do have as much say in social choice as the bourgeoise in their societies.
"If you have not personally experienced authoritarianism in the West, I respectfully suggest that it’s because you are male and white."
Well, if you haven't experienced authoritarianism in China (if one is to take that statement seriously), one might just as easily (and "respectfully") suggest that it's because you are male and Han Chinese.
I agree that the material progress that has been achieved in China is positive and laudable, and there's much more to China than just being an "autocracy". I even think China's political system might be (and perhaps has already proven to be) better positioned to tackle certain important challenges. But the heavy-handed suppression of dissent in Hong Kong and ethnocolonialism practiced in Tibet and Xinjiang are of course legitimately pointed out as serious human rights problems.
Thank you for this extremely informative, and persuasive, article. However, the following gave me pause: “Labour conditions can be brutal: precarity and intense competition in the labour market are visible realities. The welfare state remains thin. These are real structural problems…”. One wants to believe that China since the Deng / Opening Up period has remained in essence a socialist society, albeit one forced to make (NEP-style) large concessions to the prevailing international economic system—and so constitutes a genuine alternative to global capitalism. But that sentence of yours makes it difficult to hold to that belief! I would be very interested to know whether your research leads you to believe that contemporary China is indeed “socialist”—and any recommendations for further reading on this question would also be much appreciated.
Hi Peter. That's a great observation and a big question! I am actually intending to write a post in my newsletter about this soon. The short answer: I believe China is a socialist economy that embraces market dynamics (i.e. a "socialist market economy", the label the Chinese government officially uses). There's of course lots more to this that I will aim to cover in the post. I had a recent conversation with Michael Walker on Novara Media that touches on this. Here it is: https://youtu.be/UK3KE1MQI7Y?si=Nd01sP0O0yohXVJM.
China today actually resembles the pre-WW2 (but even elements of the initial post war decades) USA with big structural similarities. And that is that old America was and current day China is a system with highly decentralized economic, governmental, scientific, and financial structures. In both systems, most all real decision-making occurred locally and regionally, provincial and municipal developmental competition in China; state, municipal, civic, and regionally based industrial systems in the older USA.
In fact, in the latter 1970s and early 1980s, CPC some local party branches actually referenced the reforms of the mi 19th century American Jacksonians to argue for the reforms that ended up being enacted, and the Chinese system has in key ways looked remarkably like the system of America from the 1830s until some point after ww2 (although some of those features had been diminishing over time, but they were still quite there), for example, the Guangzhou Municipal Party School in the late 1970s, there are reports from interviews with later reform officials (such as in Deng era memoirs) that Guangzhou’s reformist intellectual circles made reference to designs established during the period of Jacksonian Democracy such as infrastructure financing models, local tax share-dominance and retention, the benefits of city-led economic experimentation, etc. And the Shanghai Economic Research Institutes in the early 1980s compared 19th-century American city-state relationships to their desired trajectory for Chinese coastal cities, which were strong port cities with fiscal and legal tools to manage foreign trade, investment, and currency operations.
It’s a market economy where “the money” doesn’t decide policy…is more accurate than calling it socialist. “Socialist” is so freighted with varying definitions, it just doesn’t fit what I live in.
I live in Wuhan, been hanging around about 18 years, and agree with the bulk of your commentary. I don’t spend time in the Dream Coast cities or Beijing; I travel the national roads and countryside and all the places no one hears about, and you’re right; the overall improvement in the lives of an approximate billion people is amazing.
You're providing a deflection to a serious question.
I respect China’s remarkable technological accomplishments, clever and restrained geopolitical manruvering, and strategic approach to growth.
China faces many headwinds, which are endemic to any modern society, however, the issue of the Uyghurs is neither trivial nor a byproduct of growth snd modernization.
It's a crime against humanity and deserves a response.
It's not a serious question. It's not a serious issue. I never was a serious issue.
It's a 100% bogus issue, like WMD and many, many others. You should have studied the subject before making a nuisance.
Some leads I recommend"
"The CIA programs in Tibet, which were very effective in destabilizing it, did not succeed in Xinjiang. There were similar efforts made with the Uyghurs during the Cold War that never really got off the ground. In both cases you had religion waved as a banner in support of a desire for independence or autonomy which is, of course, is anathema to any state". US Ambassador Chas. H. Freeman, Director for Chinese Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, 1979-1981. 8/31/18
Xinjiang: A Report and Resource Compilation BY QIAO COLLECTIVE
The story of the rise and fall of the Uyghur Genocide Hoax is a stunning example of the power of Langley and Washington DC in global brainwashing. Full details in the video, but some key points are below.
1.) The idea of fighting Islamist terrorism by creating tough re-education camps to instill patriotism came from France, NOT from China. China’s de-radicalization program was different, focused on vocational training, education in the arts, and language courses.
2.) The stunning plan from the CIA-adjacent group known as the NED was to rebrand China’s vocational program as a series of “mass killings” and “atrocities” amounting to “genocide”. The plotters met at a June 2019 conference in Washington, where NED leader Carl Gershman said the goal was to leave China “on the ash heap of history”, adding: “I believe that will happen.”
3.) But the US call for the world to back their claim of genocide in China flopped badly. Most of the world’s 200 countries refused—only seven (UK, Canada, Netherlands, Lithuania, France, Belgium and Czech Republic) agreed to back Washington’s completely evidence-free allegation.
4.) By the end of 2019, the press was printing a stream of “atrocity” reports from five different Uyghur “human rights” projects. But ALL FIVE were western organizations financed by the NED—a crucial detail that NO western mainstream media outlet chose to include.
5.) By 2020, social media was carrying a huge number of allegations saying the number of Chinese Uyghurs who had been killed had now risen above six million—all using identical words and phrasing. In reality, there was no evidence of any sort of mass killings, as the US State Department’s own lawyers warned in print. The sole image that the western mainstream press repeatedly printed as proof of the existence of the 2019 “concentration camps” was really a 2017 photograph of addicts at a drug rehab center listening to talks by a Muslim speaker, a recovered addict, and his mother.
6.) One US ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, strongly argued that despite the total lack of evidence, the Chinese had definitely committed genocide.
7.) In 2021, the NED financed a one-sided tribunal. A judge asked about the actual number of the “two million or three million” in the “internment camps”. The NED-financed witness, clearly embarrassed, said it was 5,567. One NED-financed “database” was found to contain images of Hong Kong movie stars.
8.) The US changed strategy. Okay, so China was not actually killing its Uyghur minority. But the birth rate of Uyghurs had fallen—and this could be taken as a genocide in itself, Washington argued. Scholars of genocide disagreed.
9.) Sex scandals hit the most prominent leaders in the NED’s Uyghur exploitation operation in 2024. Western mainstream media chose not to report this to their readers—but quoted these “human rights” groups less.
10.) In 2024 and 2025, the entire world was horrified to see a real genocide underway in Gaza. Western mainstream journalists abruptly halted reports on the entirely imaginary genocide in China—where the number of Uyghur Chinese continued to grow higher than the number of Han Chinese, both proportionally and in real terms.
No idea why you're blathering about "genocide hoaxes" when the issue is the treatment of Uyghurs as virtual slaves, which is extraordinarily well-documentedm
You're response reads as though it were generated by a mixture of Grok and YT Chinese cutouts.
The only thing we agree upon is that there is an ongoing genocide in Gaza.
There is zero point in further discussion with someone who sources material from dubious sources (charitably speaking).
It is propaganda wearing disappointment as a costume.
Yes, China’s infrastructure and industrial capacity are real.
But turning that into a lifestyle meme while ignoring censorship, coercion, debt stress, youth unemployment, property collapse, Taiwan pressure, and surveillance is not sophistication.
It is selective vision.
The trick is simple:
show the subway,
hide the system.
Sell efficiency,
bury the cost.
That is not understanding China.
That is consuming China as aesthetic revenge against Western decline.
And the flying cars are yet to come. Not a joke on sci-fi aesthetics, but written into the current 5-year plan: Low Altitude Economy about to be rolled out.
What I especially appreciate is that you take China’s developmental achievements seriously as something that deserves explanation rather than immediate ideological filtering.
One small addition from my own work on China messaging: I increasingly think the core of “Chinamaxxing” is system visibility. For decades, China’s rise was mostly statistical. Today, through travel, short videos, infrastructure, digital payments, logistics, electrification, and everyday urban experience, people increasingly encounter the visible outputs of an operating system.
In that sense, China’s strongest messaging may not be messaging at all. Performance is the message. People become curious because they see a system that appears capable of building, scaling, organizing, and delivering — often at surprising speed.
I am predisposed to be sympathetic to your point of view as there is a very close match between our intellectual interests and motivations (development economics, economic history, reducing as much human suffering as we can as quickly as we can). What has been achieved in China is incredible and unprecedented. But what about the suppression of dissent in China? I keep find that missing from the analysis in the China cheerleading posts. What about the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan, being under a steamroller that nothing can stop? Gutting! (I will try to read more of your work to find out if you've addressed this elsewhere)
Also wondering if you have read Branko Milonovic's Capitalism, Alone book which lays out the trade-offs between the two types of capitalisms (US/UK with European subtype and China/Authoritarian type) where does say basically that people will be voting with their feet and tolerating repressive regimes as long as economic growth translates into tangible benefits for people. The conclusions were very depressing to me as it seems that systems that suppress dissent and explicitly rely on corruption rather than elections will continue on unchecked. This is not to say that there are not major problems with the post WWII US-led world order but I hate to see the bullies win (including here in the US).
Hi I agree with a lot of what you say and thank you for your insights. However, as someone who has seen and experienced authoritarianism in the West and never in China, I take exception to your comment on needing to address authoritarianism in China. We regularly see police brutality in the West but never have I seen any equivalent brutality in China. If China censors social media, it is almost always to restrict prejudicial content, not reasoned discussion in policy matters. Whereas the West expressly censors debate about the Zionism and the British government even tells the media not to discuss certain topics at all. If China comes across as “authoritarian” it’s because capitalists do not set policy in China the way they freely do in the West. Also, the CIA and the British MI6 (and who knows what other Western and Israeli secret service do) think nothing of destabilising other societies, forcing non-Western governments to restrict protests instigated or encouraged by the CIA front known as the National Endowment for Democracy.
If you have not personally experienced authoritarianism in the West, I respectfully suggest that it’s because you are male and white. Think about this before you pontificate about authoritarianism in China.
To be clear, there are genuine areas where China could do better. For example, I wish Chinese censorship were subject to review by a “media tribunal”, so censorship comes across as less arbitrary. But please don’t propagate prejudicial attitudes about China!
Well said!
I am ethnic Chinese yes and male. But I am a Malaysian Chinese or Chinese Malaysian and just going by my limited experience of living in China. Maybe if I were female and some other ethnicity would I feel differently? Perhaps. But I stand by my claim that there is so much more authoritarianism in the US than in China. Just think of police violence and how police in Europe put down demonstrations in Europe. It’s violent. But even HK police did not resort to the violence that American and French police used against demonstrators.
“Authoritarianism is a form of government and social organization characterized by the concentration of power in a single leader or a small elite, the restriction of political pluralism, and the suppression of civil liberties.”
By this definition of authoritarianism, I dare say you need to be an olympic champion in mental gymnastics to conclude that China is less authoritarian than any Western country. If you mean that authorities in Western countries are somehow more violent than Chinese authorities, that could perhaps be debated, but I don’t really understand what data or information you base that on. Even then, the repressive apparatus in China is there so that they won’t need to use violence against their population. Does that make the repressive apparatus good? Isn’t repression a sort of “violence” in itself?
Hi, thanks for your comment. I just posted a reply to a question on Qra, which perhaps my explain my position. See: https://www.quora.com/Is-China-a-democratic-country/answer/Kien-Choong?prompt_topic_bio=1.
I think a lot of the differences in views depends on deep philosophical worldviews -- dualism vs pragmatism. The definition of authoritarianism that you cite is fundamentally dualist. You presuppose a certain criteria for "liberalism", and whatever falls short becomes labelled as authoritarian.
On the other hand, the Chinese people are deeply pragmatic. I'm not just saying that this is "consequentialism". It's deeper than that. Chinese worldview does not have the kind of dualism that is deeply rooted in Christianity and the social contract approach to political legitimacy in the West. Chinese worldview is deeply pragmatic, political legitimacy rests on the people's wellbeing. It's not a recent communist thing, it goes all the way back to Confucius.
But the Chinese system is very difficult for a Westerner to understand if they don't first sort out the difference between dualism vs pragmatism. BTW, Chinese pragmatism is actually very similar (if not the same) as American pragmatism of the type pioneered by John Dewey, Hilary Putnam, etc. But in truth, China (like in so many things) anticipated American pragmatism. The Chinese got there first!
Thanks for the link and your thoughtful reply. I think I understand what you are saying, and I think what you are saying does make sense, but I also think, respectfully, that it does not quite penetrate to the heart of the matter, if what we are talking about is the definition of China's political system.
I don't know if you have read about WB Gallie's "Essentially contested concepts"[1]? The term is pretty self-explanatory, and let's just say he lists "democracy" as one of them. The modern representative political systems of today that are conventionally called "democracies" would NOT have qualified as "democracies" to the ancient Athenians - the "original democrats". But the meanings of words change over time, and in that sense it is(/can) not "wrong" to call China a democracy. It is, in the language of semiotics, a "floating signifier". What I would say, however, is that (1) Calling China a democracy today strips the word of its analytical usefulness, that (2) calling China a democracy is really a conflation of terms that (2a) has historical roots, but also, I would argue, (2b) a conflation of terms very deliberately upheld by the Chinese Communist Party with the aim of legitimizing itself.
So on the one hand, "democracy" is an essentially contested concept and "floating signifier" that is not, and perhaps will never be, completely agreed upon. Indeed, you don't need to go to China to find these disagreements over its meaning. There's the Schumpeterian minimalist view of democracy, there's Robert Dahl's maximalist view (he prefers the word "polyarchies" for those countries that we conventionally think of as "democracies" in the west, as he doesn't believe there is a country in the world that really fulfills the democratic criteria). But there are still some universal analytical criteria that all these definitions share, and China does not fulfil them, not even the minimalist definition, and not even close.
So there is this "essentially contested concept" perspective that you can adopt, and then there is an academic analytical defintion of what a "democracy" is. And what I argue is that, if you call China a democracy, you have to really redefine what it even means to be a democracy. And here's where we come to point number (2): Democracy is ultimately a Greek word, that has traveled down to modern European languages, and then been exported to China and other "foreign civilizations" where it has been translated and acquired its own meaning, with connotations and nuances that made sense to those cultures. Lei Guang has an excellent article on the matter[2]. He talks about how democracy is usually translated as minzhu in Chinese, but that there is also the closely related term "minben" for instance. And then there is the Marxist-Leninist usage of the word too, which certainly conflicts with the modern "liberal" definition, as you would have it. But the point is, the word "democracy" is not Chinese to begin with (nor English for that matter), and (as with English), it has come to be infused with its own particular connotations (Confucian in the case of China, but also later Leninist). So ultimately, when the word enter the Chinese sphere of discourse, it already meant something slightly different, and there are also these internal disagreements and contests about what it should mean in China, just like in the West. So when we hear talk about "democracy" from a Chinese (official) perspective, we have to consider it a (re)translation of the Chinese term, rather than the same "democracy" that we think of in the West. It's two different things in that sense. Related... but different.
Then there is (2b): Democracy just has a good ring to it. We live in a globalized world where English has gained this status of global lingua franca almost, and with it has come the values already imbued in the English words. So "democracy" is associated with "good". So to legitimize themselves, the CCP can't really call themselves "authoritarian", because that is the antithesis of "democracy", and hence of "good" (this is perhaps the "dualism" you referred to?). So, while you could say that it is disingenuous when you hear CCP officials talk about "whole-process democracy" (and it is disingenuous), you can also ask yourself, what would you do if you were them? There could be alternative ways of defining the Chinese political system, but ultimately being a "democracy" is a sign of status in today's "international society". Maybe in the future there will be room for alternatives status-wise, but for now it makes sense for the CPC to try to "hijack" the term. And even if I argue that, in intent, it is a form of hijacking from their part, I don't dismiss discussion about what democracy means, should mean, and could mean, in different contexts, because again, words are words. In sum, I don't think you're wrong, but I argue that when you talk about "democracy" in the context of China, it is a conflation of terms (in an analytical sense). What you are actually talking about is "good governance", or "accountable government". You could also simply be using the word in a Chinese sense, but then I argue that it is a translation of a Chinese concept into "democracy", and it is really not a very good translation, analytically speaking.
Hope I didn't forget anything and that I got my point through. And thank you again for the engagement. Best regards.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/4544562
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/009770049602200403?__cf_chl_f_tk=X8gDlEDrc74pFMr8Pshyzdj.7LrMD7z80I7GJ6d5MiM-1783174662-1.0.1.1-f8SfsZJUKUdefzA.2luj68SIs7Lt7RtsiUt7VwW9BDo
Hi, thank you. It seems you have something that I can learn from. But let me share with you my own personal journey. First, while I'm ethnic Chinese, I have a largely Western upbringing. I also grew up in a Christian family, and still attend church regularly. In many ways, I think I know more about Western philosophy, Western traditions and Western culture than many average Westerners do, while at the same time by knowledge of Chinese philosophy, traditions and culture is abysmal.
On the idea of democracy being a contested term, my journey really began with Amarty Sen's work on "The Idea of Justice" and many of his other works (e.g., The possibility of social choice, Development as Freedom, etc) and it is Sen who has deeply influenced my own thinking about democracy.
I am not sure whether Sen would call China a democracy, but at various points in his work, he argues that we value democracy because we value having a say in social choice. (Sen is one of the leading scholars of social choice theory, and his work in this area likely contributed to Sen being awarded the Nobel prize for economics.) Also, in The Idea of Justice, Sen contrasts two approaches to justice: (1) a transcendental, institutions based approach exemplified by the social contractarian approach of Locke, Rousseau and John Rawls, and (2) a comparative pragmatic approach in which Sen actually regards both Adam Smith and Karl Marx as exemplars.
It led me to think about what "democracy" really means. Like most Westerners, I started from the position that democracy is about elections. But that is really a transcendent, institutional based approach to democracy, which defines democracy in terms of a set of specific (typically Western liberal) institutions. Whereas taking the comparative pragmatic approach, democracy is (I argue) about every person having a broadly equal say in social choice.
In the Nicomadean Ethics, Aristotle famously observed that wealth is not something we value for its own sake, but for the same of something else (or words to that effect). Similarly, democracy in a procedural sense is not something we value for its own sake, but for the sake of something else. What we really value about democracy is that every one (regardless of social status, wealth, ethnicity, gender, etc) have a broadly equal say in social choice. Many different kinds of institutions (including I submit the Chinese Communist political institution) can achieve (or at least approximate) this ideal where we all have an equal say in social choice.
It will not take you or I long to realise that the Western political system doesn't actually ensure everyone has an equal say in social choice. The "bourgeoise" tends to dominate, and the wealthy have a disproportionate influence on government. Especially in America where political campaigns are now so expensive that politicians are beholden to wealthy supporters.
Whereas the Chinese political system is not beholden to capitalists. The reason why China's political system comes across as "authoritarian" is because rich people don't get to dictate terms to the Chinese government. You might not yet have realised this, but the rich and wealthy among us tend to have relatively fragile personalities. They get very easily offended if they don't get their way. I learnt this long ago working for an anti-trust regulator trying to control monopolies and abuses of market power. The wealthy don't appreciate being told they cannot acquire market power or use their market power to raise prices!
It is not just an issue of terminology, and incidentally, the very approach of appealing to established terminology to distinguish "democracies" from other political system is a transcendental, institutions based approach to democracy. But if we are willing to take a pragmatic comparative approach, China's credentials as a democracy is not bad! It's not perfect, but rich people in China don't get to have more say than the poor!
I think another complication is many people are pessimistic about the idea that everyone can have a say on social choice (as in ancient Athens, at least among its male citizens). In fairness, for much of humanity's experience living in social groups, giving everyone an equal say in social choice has always been an ideal that is difficult to live up to. But many different traditions do have that ideal. I suspect that some African villages probably even practice democracy that way. We all value having a say in social choice.
But the good news is that with the social media, universal education, general public health, the ideal of everyone having an equal say in social choice is within reach. What we need is an institution that is committed to engaging with all sectors of society, whether rich and poor. And on that, the Chinese political institution performs well, and I would argue, better than the American political institution. Do politicians in America pay as much attention to what the proleteriat wants as they do to what the bourgeoise wants? I think you know the answer.
China's democracy is not perfect, but taking a comparative pragmatic approach, one can reasonably say that China's democracy is better and healthier than America's, at least today. It was not always thus. There was a time when democracy in America, Australia, etc really worked well. Politicians were committed to governing in the public interest. But democracy is in a crisis in much of the West today because Western politicans have become so partisan.
China's traditions (going back to imperial China) has always viewed factions and rivalry with suspicion. And modern China today values harmony over rivalry. It's not an unreasonable position. Most people don't realise that China is actually a mutli-party democracy, but all political parties in China work together under the United Front, a department that seeks to ensure political parties have representation at the People's Congress. Is rivalry at the electoral box so essential to democracy? It depends on one's philosophical world view.
BTW, may I invite you to subscribe to my Substack journal: "The possibility of democratic choice". It's inspired by Amartya Sen's work, including his book "The possibility of social choice". I generally post a short article every day, exploring one specific idea. I group my articles together under a "Contents Page", and move on to a different but related theme. Perhaps you can help me by reading and commenting on my posts?
I don't claim to be an expert on the topics I discuss. What I try to do is to present the arguments, and I usually base my arguments on academic literature. My bet is that in the not too distant future, China's status as a democracy will be firmly established and recognised world wide. Perhaps not in the West, but in the Global South. And that is not a bad thing if it means the proleteriat in the Global South do have as much say in social choice as the bourgeoise in their societies.
"If you have not personally experienced authoritarianism in the West, I respectfully suggest that it’s because you are male and white."
Well, if you haven't experienced authoritarianism in China (if one is to take that statement seriously), one might just as easily (and "respectfully") suggest that it's because you are male and Han Chinese.
I agree that the material progress that has been achieved in China is positive and laudable, and there's much more to China than just being an "autocracy". I even think China's political system might be (and perhaps has already proven to be) better positioned to tackle certain important challenges. But the heavy-handed suppression of dissent in Hong Kong and ethnocolonialism practiced in Tibet and Xinjiang are of course legitimately pointed out as serious human rights problems.
Thank you for this extremely informative, and persuasive, article. However, the following gave me pause: “Labour conditions can be brutal: precarity and intense competition in the labour market are visible realities. The welfare state remains thin. These are real structural problems…”. One wants to believe that China since the Deng / Opening Up period has remained in essence a socialist society, albeit one forced to make (NEP-style) large concessions to the prevailing international economic system—and so constitutes a genuine alternative to global capitalism. But that sentence of yours makes it difficult to hold to that belief! I would be very interested to know whether your research leads you to believe that contemporary China is indeed “socialist”—and any recommendations for further reading on this question would also be much appreciated.
Hi Peter. That's a great observation and a big question! I am actually intending to write a post in my newsletter about this soon. The short answer: I believe China is a socialist economy that embraces market dynamics (i.e. a "socialist market economy", the label the Chinese government officially uses). There's of course lots more to this that I will aim to cover in the post. I had a recent conversation with Michael Walker on Novara Media that touches on this. Here it is: https://youtu.be/UK3KE1MQI7Y?si=Nd01sP0O0yohXVJM.
China today actually resembles the pre-WW2 (but even elements of the initial post war decades) USA with big structural similarities. And that is that old America was and current day China is a system with highly decentralized economic, governmental, scientific, and financial structures. In both systems, most all real decision-making occurred locally and regionally, provincial and municipal developmental competition in China; state, municipal, civic, and regionally based industrial systems in the older USA.
In fact, in the latter 1970s and early 1980s, CPC some local party branches actually referenced the reforms of the mi 19th century American Jacksonians to argue for the reforms that ended up being enacted, and the Chinese system has in key ways looked remarkably like the system of America from the 1830s until some point after ww2 (although some of those features had been diminishing over time, but they were still quite there), for example, the Guangzhou Municipal Party School in the late 1970s, there are reports from interviews with later reform officials (such as in Deng era memoirs) that Guangzhou’s reformist intellectual circles made reference to designs established during the period of Jacksonian Democracy such as infrastructure financing models, local tax share-dominance and retention, the benefits of city-led economic experimentation, etc. And the Shanghai Economic Research Institutes in the early 1980s compared 19th-century American city-state relationships to their desired trajectory for Chinese coastal cities, which were strong port cities with fiscal and legal tools to manage foreign trade, investment, and currency operations.
It’s a market economy where “the money” doesn’t decide policy…is more accurate than calling it socialist. “Socialist” is so freighted with varying definitions, it just doesn’t fit what I live in.
I live in Wuhan, been hanging around about 18 years, and agree with the bulk of your commentary. I don’t spend time in the Dream Coast cities or Beijing; I travel the national roads and countryside and all the places no one hears about, and you’re right; the overall improvement in the lives of an approximate billion people is amazing.
Many thanks, Jostein—I look forward to that post (and to the Novara conversation). Cheers, Peter
You haven't mentioned the humanitarian nightmare of the horrific treatment of the Uyghurs.
How do you reconcile the slavery of 1M people with your sunny Chinamaxxing?
Be serious.
You're providing a deflection to a serious question.
I respect China’s remarkable technological accomplishments, clever and restrained geopolitical manruvering, and strategic approach to growth.
China faces many headwinds, which are endemic to any modern society, however, the issue of the Uyghurs is neither trivial nor a byproduct of growth snd modernization.
It's a crime against humanity and deserves a response.
It's not a serious question. It's not a serious issue. I never was a serious issue.
It's a 100% bogus issue, like WMD and many, many others. You should have studied the subject before making a nuisance.
Some leads I recommend"
"The CIA programs in Tibet, which were very effective in destabilizing it, did not succeed in Xinjiang. There were similar efforts made with the Uyghurs during the Cold War that never really got off the ground. In both cases you had religion waved as a banner in support of a desire for independence or autonomy which is, of course, is anathema to any state". US Ambassador Chas. H. Freeman, Director for Chinese Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, 1979-1981. 8/31/18
Xinjiang: A Report and Resource Compilation BY QIAO COLLECTIVE
https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/xinjiang
Full Playlist of Uyghur's statements: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?app=desktop&list=PLkbOIKUddMBtp0_xEFqn4zey48kkgJq5w
The story of the rise and fall of the Uyghur Genocide Hoax is a stunning example of the power of Langley and Washington DC in global brainwashing. Full details in the video, but some key points are below.
1.) The idea of fighting Islamist terrorism by creating tough re-education camps to instill patriotism came from France, NOT from China. China’s de-radicalization program was different, focused on vocational training, education in the arts, and language courses.
2.) The stunning plan from the CIA-adjacent group known as the NED was to rebrand China’s vocational program as a series of “mass killings” and “atrocities” amounting to “genocide”. The plotters met at a June 2019 conference in Washington, where NED leader Carl Gershman said the goal was to leave China “on the ash heap of history”, adding: “I believe that will happen.”
3.) But the US call for the world to back their claim of genocide in China flopped badly. Most of the world’s 200 countries refused—only seven (UK, Canada, Netherlands, Lithuania, France, Belgium and Czech Republic) agreed to back Washington’s completely evidence-free allegation.
4.) By the end of 2019, the press was printing a stream of “atrocity” reports from five different Uyghur “human rights” projects. But ALL FIVE were western organizations financed by the NED—a crucial detail that NO western mainstream media outlet chose to include.
5.) By 2020, social media was carrying a huge number of allegations saying the number of Chinese Uyghurs who had been killed had now risen above six million—all using identical words and phrasing. In reality, there was no evidence of any sort of mass killings, as the US State Department’s own lawyers warned in print. The sole image that the western mainstream press repeatedly printed as proof of the existence of the 2019 “concentration camps” was really a 2017 photograph of addicts at a drug rehab center listening to talks by a Muslim speaker, a recovered addict, and his mother.
6.) One US ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, strongly argued that despite the total lack of evidence, the Chinese had definitely committed genocide.
7.) In 2021, the NED financed a one-sided tribunal. A judge asked about the actual number of the “two million or three million” in the “internment camps”. The NED-financed witness, clearly embarrassed, said it was 5,567. One NED-financed “database” was found to contain images of Hong Kong movie stars.
8.) The US changed strategy. Okay, so China was not actually killing its Uyghur minority. But the birth rate of Uyghurs had fallen—and this could be taken as a genocide in itself, Washington argued. Scholars of genocide disagreed.
9.) Sex scandals hit the most prominent leaders in the NED’s Uyghur exploitation operation in 2024. Western mainstream media chose not to report this to their readers—but quoted these “human rights” groups less.
10.) In 2024 and 2025, the entire world was horrified to see a real genocide underway in Gaza. Western mainstream journalists abruptly halted reports on the entirely imaginary genocide in China—where the number of Uyghur Chinese continued to grow higher than the number of Han Chinese, both proportionally and in real terms.
No idea why you're blathering about "genocide hoaxes" when the issue is the treatment of Uyghurs as virtual slaves, which is extraordinarily well-documentedm
You're response reads as though it were generated by a mixture of Grok and YT Chinese cutouts.
The only thing we agree upon is that there is an ongoing genocide in Gaza.
There is zero point in further discussion with someone who sources material from dubious sources (charitably speaking).
A lot of “Chinamaxxing” is not analysis.
It is propaganda wearing disappointment as a costume.
Yes, China’s infrastructure and industrial capacity are real.
But turning that into a lifestyle meme while ignoring censorship, coercion, debt stress, youth unemployment, property collapse, Taiwan pressure, and surveillance is not sophistication.
It is selective vision.
The trick is simple:
show the subway,
hide the system.
Sell efficiency,
bury the cost.
That is not understanding China.
That is consuming China as aesthetic revenge against Western decline.
And the flying cars are yet to come. Not a joke on sci-fi aesthetics, but written into the current 5-year plan: Low Altitude Economy about to be rolled out.
Excellent thesis!
What I especially appreciate is that you take China’s developmental achievements seriously as something that deserves explanation rather than immediate ideological filtering.
One small addition from my own work on China messaging: I increasingly think the core of “Chinamaxxing” is system visibility. For decades, China’s rise was mostly statistical. Today, through travel, short videos, infrastructure, digital payments, logistics, electrification, and everyday urban experience, people increasingly encounter the visible outputs of an operating system.
In that sense, China’s strongest messaging may not be messaging at all. Performance is the message. People become curious because they see a system that appears capable of building, scaling, organizing, and delivering — often at surprising speed.
I am Europeanmaxxing
You should listen to Yuri Bezmenov’s teachings on subversion.
Understanding THE CHINA CONUNDRUM - Free Download.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/19lU5Fg930POis2wNzK-xbfACd1pRh_l-/view?usp=sharing
it's about gradient not the level
and that's what only matters
https://inconvenienttruthteller.substack.com/p/the-calculus-of-decline-why-shakespeares
Excellent Article Jostein. I always look forward to reading you work.
I am predisposed to be sympathetic to your point of view as there is a very close match between our intellectual interests and motivations (development economics, economic history, reducing as much human suffering as we can as quickly as we can). What has been achieved in China is incredible and unprecedented. But what about the suppression of dissent in China? I keep find that missing from the analysis in the China cheerleading posts. What about the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan, being under a steamroller that nothing can stop? Gutting! (I will try to read more of your work to find out if you've addressed this elsewhere)
Also wondering if you have read Branko Milonovic's Capitalism, Alone book which lays out the trade-offs between the two types of capitalisms (US/UK with European subtype and China/Authoritarian type) where does say basically that people will be voting with their feet and tolerating repressive regimes as long as economic growth translates into tangible benefits for people. The conclusions were very depressing to me as it seems that systems that suppress dissent and explicitly rely on corruption rather than elections will continue on unchecked. This is not to say that there are not major problems with the post WWII US-led world order but I hate to see the bullies win (including here in the US).
But what about the suppression of dissent in China? I’ve never found any and I’ve looked for years. Can you provide an example?
Not an allegation, a documented case and a link?
They want, NEED it to be be true. They care so much about Chinese people that they need them to be suffering. That's how much they care.
https://lucid.substack.com/p/as-china-disappears-people-and-histories?utm_source=publication-search
No allegations, Monica.