It's a communist gov't. The people "letting the gov't decide" has little do with it.

I think you are trivializing thousands of years of history with this. China is ... china. They use the same alphabet they used when egyptians used hieroglyphs. The sensibilities of the chinese population are not about a people being dominated by a marxist tyranny. It's china being ruled as it has always been ruled - the dynasties have come and gone but the dynamics of government - and the cultural sensibilities which coexist with these - have co-existed longer than most western countries have a written history.

The communist party is just another dynasty in the long succession of dynasties. That they have a specific brand of ideology should not fool you - the current china is more of a pragmatic autocracy than an ideological communist state.

> the current china is more of a pragmatic autocracy

Has there ever been a nominally communist state that wasn't a pragmatic autocracy? That seems to be the main criticism of communism... that it's impossible without immoral coercion of some sort.

'Immoral coercion' makes it sound like a quick graft. I suggest it's more fruitful to compare countrys policies with the histories of government within the same region rather than other countries in different cultural regions. If you want to moralize this method makes it far easier to pinpoint the really bad apples.

No matter the history, using communist as a synonym for totalitarian is lazy.

No matter the history, using terms as they are applied in real life is generally accepted. The definition of communism means one thing, the real world applications of it are something else. How many communist governments have there been that weren't totalitarian?

As I implicitly recognised in my initial comment, the number of non totalitarian communist governments is small. Nonetheless there are plenty of people who self-identify as communist (e.g. in Greece) who don't advocate policies that require or imply totalitarianism. That's why the precision matters.

Well since Communism advocates a stateless (and classless) society there will probably never be one.

Well there aren't any actual communist governments, so there haven't been any totalitarian ones. :P

I agree, somewhat, about using vernacular, but that misses the point.

The USSR was no-more a communism because they said so than they'd have been a capitalism by saying so... You are as you do, not as you wish to be seen doing.

In this case they're not totalitarian though. China is a Republic, it's just a Republic with a taller pyramid than our own.

You elect district leaders, who elect state leaders and the congress, and they elect the president and prime minister.

Technically, that's roughly the same system we have here with the electoral congress and faithless electors. The difference is that in the US, faithless electors are much less common than in China.

But you can look here and see that there is a history of faithless electors in the US too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector#List_of_fait...

China's system is actually not so different from ours was 150 years ago, so they're not that far off all-told. Or, actually, in a sense even more recently when the congress decided between Bush and Gore.

> You elect district leaders

...from a list of candidates approved by the Communist Party.

Which actually means you have more choice.

In the US you generally get one Democrat and one Republican.

When you have only one party, it's as though you have no parties, you get to elect from many different candidates.

Look at the unrest in Hong Kong over China pre-approving candidates for political office. In a place that had democracy and is transitioning to Chinese rule it is obvious that very many people don't think they are getting "more choice" with their locked in list of candidates. I am not championing the US system (it has many flaws) but at least Democrats and Republicans have vastly different ideologies that people can choose from. That citizens from both parties tend to pick moderate candidates (that are closer in ideology) does not lessen the real choice the people are given when voting in elections.

Looking at what China does in Hong Kong is vastly different from what China does in China.

By the same token, in the States we get say in the president. The same is not true for places under the control of The Office of Insular Affairs & Puerto Rico.

At least the citizens of Hong Kong get to vote.

I'm not saying Chinese government is perfect, it absolutely has massive hurdles before it could be described as modern, but it's not nearly as bad as most Westerners make it out to be. A lot has changed in the last 30 years.

Not so different from there, where our candidates are chosen by those from the wealthy. No access to large sums of money, no viable candidacy.

Communist governments, in order to function, pretty much have to be totalitarian - unless you can think of another way to have a one party system with complete control over the economy.

But not all totalitarian governments are communist. Can China actually be called a communist country?