> China under Xi Jinping has effectively turned into a dicatatorship

How was it not one before Xi Jinping?

Previously it was a sort of vaguely Maoist gerontocracy; power was concentrated in some central committees, not just the premier.

What difference does it make to the common people, or to political activists, that power is spread out among the leaders of dozen CCP committees, versus a single man?

The police will continue to repress, the press committees will continue to censor...

Dictators tend to collapse along with the stability of their countries. The more distributed power is, the more stable it is. China was already a huge country with massively centralized power. Now it’s still huge, but the power is concentrated in just one man, and thats even more unstable. So... worse crackdowns, even less freedom, and a much worse and less potentially flexible long term trajectory.

Edit: to be clear I am not endorsing either system, just describing them as accurately as possible.

There's a case to be made that a government by a large number of committees and other institutions tends to be more benevolent.

Many of the worst actions of repressive regimes have usually been motivated by emotions, not expediency. As more people get involved, the chance of any single personal obsession resulting in crass harm to, for example, a certain group of citizen is lowered.

Competition for power among people and/or these institutions also results in a sort of crude "checks and balances". There are too many people with considerable power that it becomes impossible for all of them to move billions to Switzerland, and if only a few do so, they risk being taken down by others who get jealous.

Of course, as China shows, this is still far below the standards set by real rule of law. But compare China with the half-bit dictators (Qaddafi, Barack Hussein) and it's hard to deny that it's not quite that bad.

Sure, when you've got an incredibly paranoid sociopath like Stalin, who sees traitors and enemies of the revolution in every shadow, you're going to have serious problems. Xi does not strike me as one. (But I could, of course, be proven wrong.)

How about the guy after Xi? After that? The power, once concentrated tends to remain so, and eventually you roll a Hoxha, Stalin, or Pol Pot.

Given that the Maoist gerontocracy managed to produce a dictatorship by Xi, it doesn't seem that it actually protects people from despotism. Eventually, someone wins the power struggle, and consolidates power under themselves.

Comrade Stalin didn't become Vozjd because the Bolshevik party wanted to instill an all-powerful dictator. Like Xi, he decisively won a power struggle in a government which was originally composed of a number of powerful committees.

The revolution had ~30 fathers - yet, 13 years after Lenin's death, all but one of them - Stalin - were dead, in a GULAG, or in exile (And soon to be dead).

The only way to protect against despotism is to have relatively frequent turnover in government. If US presidents and congresscritters were elected for 20 year terms, the US would have long ago become a dictatorship.

The secret is to continue raising the standard of living of the people as fast as it's been raising in the past 2 decades.

I thought the problem with that is that it is literally impossible to continue the trajectory.

It might be a better time to say this when the strategy start to fail but this seems like american wishful thinking as China keeps growing strongly.

You mean party secretary. The premier is Li Keqiang, who is pretty powerless, at least compared to Wen Jiabao.

You’re right, my bad!

Xi is a strongish leader, almost as strong as Jiang zemin. Compared to Hu Jintao, he is much stronger, but this is mostly a return to normalcy.

> That's the reason why Beijing has recently cracked down on VPN.

This is completely unrelated to Xi's reign. The point is to keep the population "harmonious" before the Communist Party congress that starts next week.

> sent many of the young, brave democratic protestors in Hong Kong to prison, silenced many of its Xi critics, etc.

The crackdown on black people and BLM is very similar, but a lot more violent.

I'd say that has more to do with societal norms and biases, not political strategy.

From a commoner standpoint, for sure.

This is what you can't say in America - that the "democracy" is not so democratic.

> This is what you can't say in America

Yes you can. You just did. It’s a stupid thing to say, in the same vein as likening the Civil Rights Movement to contemporaneous protests under Diem’s regime in Vietnam or the Cultural Revolution in China. But we have the First Amendment and courts to defend it. It’s not perfect, but it’s miles apart from a full security crackdown.

No, you can't say it because it is heresy and a social faux pas. Additionally, just see what happens when you actually stand up to the American political power - the fates of MLK and Malcolm X, and in more recent times Manning etc.

And on HN, you get massively downvoted so your post disappears.

You’re equating downvotes with getting thrown in jail and exfiltraring conventional military secrets (video from a military aircraft, i.e. Manning) with expressing politically unpopular views in a public, civilian forum. Keep in mind, too, that we actually got civil rights laws passed and enforced, irrespective of what happened to MLK or Malcom X. That isn’t the case in repressive regimes.

Downvotes (or name and shame) is censorship the same way or even worse than governmental censorship because it is socially accepted.

Oh, in that case, I'm all for people getting thrown in jail instead of down-voted when they claim the US is run by a vast conspiracy no better than China.

And I won't accept it, even socially, I promise.

People are been throw in jail, you know? Some of them when they are lucky to not be killed before getting there.