this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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Western organizations have found that over 90% of the population approve the government, which is shown to be consistent and accurate. This isn't coming from the government, but from western orgs directly asking Chinese people. Further, despite evidence that the government of China isn't lying about public ownership being principle, and the transparent form of democracy we can view, you still don't trust the government's claims either!
Dictatorships that operate regardless of the will of the people such as Russia also "report high rates of approval".
This is just phrasemongering on your part. The PRC is a democracy that operates based on consultative democracy, and these numbers are coming from western orgs. Your refusal to even accept western views on China points to an underlying dogmatism in your viewpoint that can only be explained by illogical foundations, ie chauvanism. I suggest you either bring facts and numbers, or accept that the CPC has high approval rates, else you're just being chauvanistic.
You didn't engage with my argument, so I won't with yours either.
Let's call it phrasemongering.
I did engage with your point, we aren't talking about a dictatorship but a democratically run country, and not numbers gathered by the country itself but by western, hostile countries. Your analogy does not compare, western orgs have consistently found high approval rates. Why?
Whether or not the country calls itself democratic isnt relevant.
Engage with this: why does Russia have high approval rates?
Russia's approval rates are largely self-reported, unlike China's which are reported by tons of western organizations. These are not equal situations. Further, China doesn't merely call itself democratic, it is democratic.
The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people's democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local government is directly elected, and then these governments 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. Moreover, the economy in the PRC is socialist, with public ownership as the principle aspect of the economy. Combining this consultative, ground-up democracy with top-down economic planning is the key to China's success.
I highly recommend Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. Socialist democracy has been imperfect, but has gone through a number of changes and adaptations over the years as we've learned more from testing theory to practice. Boer goes over the history behind socialist democracy in this textbook.
The working classes in socialist countries are the ones dictating the state and its direction.
It passes in terms of what democracies are in practice but the political suppression, surveillance, and censorship that China is known for its anything but democratic.
Why should capitalists be allowed in the democratic processes of a socialist state? True democracy means rule by the people, not a privledged class.
That's not what I said. Under the veneer of censoring capitalism, you allow broader censorship.
Censorship is not a blanket thing, it's specifically targetting misinformation, pro-capitalist speech, and that which undermines socialism. The working classes use it to silence capitalists.
You're saying that, why should I believe that's actually the case?
Censorship is always done with some sort of "positive" narrative tied to it.
Because it's the reason censorship is used. People don't censor for fun, but to protect the system. China is socialist and run by the working classes, it would not have the support it does if it was brutally oppressing them.