u/mercury_pointer

The mods swear a legally binding oath, get paid, and work full time. They must have graduated a special 4 week long mod training program conducted over zoom.

In China the executive is selected by the national legislature from amongst their own members. They can withdraw their support at any time. There is no impeachment charges or trial, they simply pass a motion to transfer their representation to another member of the body.

In a similar way the national legislature is made up of representatives selected by the city and county legislatures. The city and country legislatures are made up of representatives selected by the town and neighborhood legislatures. The town and neighborhood legislatures are elected by the general population. The local legislatures have political campaigns and serve fixed length terms.

Arguments can be made that this is more or less representative of the will of the people then a western democracy, but to call this system dictatorship is factually incorrect.

Some prewritten answers to expected responses:

A) "China is bad, evil, and wrong because of X, Y and Z"

The title of this post is not "China is good" I will defend my position as stated and ignore everything else.

B) "Candidates in the local elections are screened by the government"

This is true, but at least the people doing that screening were elected and also promoted by their peers. Certainly that is no more dictatorial then the western campaign finance system, where a credible campaign requires the support of unelected rich people.

C) "You are a naive child if you think Xi doesn't control those legislatures behind the scenes"

If that is so obvious to you then you should have no difficulty producing evidence.

No limits, whatever sacrifice is needed to make a government represent the will of a people who are informed but not bombarded or tribalized.

First a summary of Chinese governmental structure:

In China the only elections are local ones. Everyone gets to vote for their representative on the town or neighborhood council. That council picks from its own members someone to represent them in a city or county council. That second level council picks someone to send to the province level, which then sends someone to the national level. The national level assembly picks from it's members someone to serve as executive.

At the low level there are regular scheduled elections and thus term lengths. For the others the legislative body which selected the representative is free to replace them at any time.

One of the duties of the city or county level council is to screen candidates for the neighborhood or town levels. This may seem anti-democratic and is certainly used to propagate a uniformity of ideology, but at least the people doing the screening got their positions via democratic means. Also as a point of practicality: since money is not a limiting factor to candidacy, someone has to keep the crazies from wasting everyone's time.

My argument:

In the west there also are people screening candidates, but those people were never elected: if you fail to get enough "campaign contributions" and Super PAC support and your candidacy may as well not exist.

It's tiresome and adds nothing of value.