i don't belive much of what 'our' government or its 'mainstream media' tell me and this covers one of those items that they aim at;

When you hear the name of the country “China”, what is your immediate reaction?

It’s an authoritarian, aggressive state that oppresses its citizens, perhaps.

If so, you are responding with a knee-jerk, ill-informed reaction, not really your fault, it’s the diet you have been fed, and the purpose of this article is first to try to persuade you to think otherwise, and then to describe what life is really like, from someone who actually lives there, experiencing it on a daily basis.

Well, where to begin?

Let’s start then with that (1) undemocratic state which (2) oppresses its citizens with its “social credit scores”, and is (3) an aggressive threat on the world stage.

Chinese democracy

I have to laugh when British people accuse China of being undemocratic. The UK has an unelected head of state (a king), an unelected upper chamber, and in the recent past had as prime minister an MP elected to the post by nobody (he was unopposed), and a foreign secretary a “lord” who wasn’t even elected as an MP at all. In recent years it has had a string of leaders each worse than the last, one of whom was forced to resign after 45 days having precipitated a financial crisis. The electoral system enabled the present ruling party to win a landslide with one vote from every five electors, so the vast majority of voters are completely unrepresented: clearly it has no democratic mandate whatsoever. The two major parties are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, so the idea that there is some choice is pure fantasy. This, then is the benchmark against which I study the Chinese system.

How to organize a democracy in a population of 1.4 billion, some 20 times that of the UK? China does it by arranging successive layers of government, each one more or less selected by the layer below. I had a rough idea of how it works, but I asked Deepseek to give me a summary of how representation works in practice:........more.......