In my eyes China is a technocratic autocracy, not a dictatorship. This would explain the hypothesis why they want their brains to work on rockets rather than ad tech, as OP assumed.
He can be voted out at any time. Western democracies don't even have democratic recall outside of the neutered impeachment process. GTF outta here with your completely ignorant takes on Chinese politics, you clearly have never been there nor read much about it.
Term limits are horrible for the working class in the U.S. Constant political turnover means groups like ALEC basically run our legislating process. Killing term limits for certain offices means that as someone gains experience and competence, they continue to lead, whereas in the U.S. they'd arbitrarily have to leave office right when they're getting the lay of the land.
It'd be like firing our senior dev and putting in a junior – no wonder shit never gets done in the States.
> He can be voted out at any time. Western democracies don't even have democratic recall outside of the neutered impeachment process.
Seems a very odd thing to complain about 'neutered impeachment processes' in Western democracies whilst claiming he can be 'voted out at any time'. The US President can be impeached at any time too and removed from office. You claim impeachment is neutered presumably because the power has never successfully removed anyone from office. How then do you manage to praise the Chinese system for its ability to remove leaders. They don't have democratic recall either despite the theatre of voting, their President has never been removed and is essentially selected by his predecessor, the worst performing president at election captured more than 90% of the vote and even with the addition of state sanctioned 'independents' the leader still captures 99% of the vote.
Secondly, I'm not sure exactly why you say 'Western democracies' when you really just mean the US. Just because you're unhappy with the most recent impeachment failures doesn't mean other 'Western democracies' lack the ability to remove the ruling party or the leader.
It's an authoritarian oligarchy currently trending towards more autocracy. I think people often have an unfortunate lack of political vocabulary, and therefor loosely use terms like "dictatorship" for any system with a large amount of political repression.
I know this is just semantics but I actually like 'technocratic autocracy' better than any sort of oligopoly to describe China. There are no other poles of power, the army even reports directly to the party rather than the government. And, so far, they've been quite dynamic on the technocratic front, people get fired for incompetence despite having a political base.
> There are no other poles of power, the army even reports directly to the party rather than the government.
I think you have a point with your use of "technocratic," but it is an oligarchy. The party is the olígos. Autocracy implies stuff like the army reports to the leader, not the party. I think things are trending that way, but I don't think it's historically accurate (at least for the last several decades).
You're right, I was thinking of oligopoly more in the terms where it's usually applied to Russia and the ruling 'set' all have different, separate power bases.
