How is China “totalitarian?” Their people report some of the highest satisfaction with their democracy in the world:

This is not to say that China is perfect. Xi Jinping himself stressed the importance of continuously improving “Whole Process People’s Democracy” explicitly and repeatedly. However, the idea that China is “totalitarian” isn’t really accurate, and this is reflected by the continuous pro-social policies implemented in China. Just take a look at how the bottom 50% of China have consistently been valued and uplifted:

While the CPC controls the state, the CPC is subservient to the entirety of the working class in China. There is no other way to reconcile the continuous improvements to the lives of the people of China, no other way to explain such a phenomenon. If such a country of 1.4 billion people merely relied on the benevolence of totalitarians, it would have long ago lost the support of the people. Instead, China’s democratic institutions work in a fundamentally different way from western expectations.

This doesn’t mean they do not exist, rather, it means that it can be more difficult to understand the complexity of Chinese democracy purely based on western understandings of democracy that place high emphasis on representatives and pluralism rather than cohesion and policy driven from the bottom-up. Policy in China comes from below, and is interpreted through a Marxist-Leninist understanding at the top. This unity of bottom-up and top-down policy making is the heart of Chinese democracy, and has roots in the Marxist traditions of the mass line theory and democratic centralism.

All in all, I think the shifting understanding of China among the west demands a more thorough investigation into the how and why of the Chinese system. Such an investigation requires that we put ourselves in their shoes, rather than project western ideas onto them and see how they do or do not measure up. Otherwise, it is inevitable that such an investigation will miss the essense of the Chinese system, of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.