Systemic corruption makes the rule of law "difficult" to enforce. And by difficult I mean this is a feature not a bug for the huge interconnected web of power that actually runs the country.

PS: The fact China is not a democracy which has some unpleasant results: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

All it takes is one party member (out of 80M) lodging a complaint with the central committee.

Just like USA would be a very different place if 300M people had a vote that mattered, China would be a very different place if 80M people had a complaint mechanism that mattered. We'll never hear of the city clerk who complains about the excesses of the latest giant project imposed upon local citizens. There are probably hundreds of those people, and they have all been taken care of. (Most of them in standard bureaucratic politicking fashion: "she said this terrible thing about Xi" "there is corruption in his office" etc. Kicking down is a great way to move up, when an official a couple rungs up approved the project and wants the complaints to go away.)

Yes because they read all missives personally. And no one ever interferes with those missives or those who send them. And no one ever lies in them for personal gain or joy in chaos.

Quick, do a good job and renovate everything, hide or move anything annoying or embarrassing while the boss is here is part of Chinese management everywhere from Xi Jinping on down. Supervision and management are hard, especially when your subordinates are constantly shading the truth and covering things up.

Thanks for the video. It's very educational.

The other side is true as well. The Boss of Bosses can get a call from Trump and that factory owner is arrested in 15 minutes.

Pretty sure even "democratic" countries has so much difficulty with corruption. Then there is the Federal Reserve..

My true definition of democracy is direct democracy. Once you start giving power to a representative then you stop being democratic. And that includes power to survive, eat, have shelter, have vacation, have time to study and pursue creative things.

But unless we can instantly communicate like the Protoss can then no, we can't achieve 'rule by the people'. However, it's not simply a choice of Direct Democracy, 3-branch system, 1-party system. We can have system where there is way less concentrated power (again, emphasis on power including many things like education in critical thinking).

Having said that. Yes China is not a democracy. Nor any other country. It is a question of how power (again, my emphasis) is concentrated and the potential of corruption.

In the United States, the Founding Fathers debated the idea of direct democracy at length and rejected it. Their reasons included preserving state sovereignty/local governance, and protecting rural minorities. Here's an article by George Friedman at Stratfor which serves as an introduction to the discussion: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_13051196

The only thing which can reliably be said about modern debate on how to structure a good representative government, is that the participants are rarely informed about the 500 years of debate on the subject that occurred before they were born

I keep being amazed how Americans treat anything said or done by the Founding Fathers (with two capital Fs even) as holy scripture.

They were just some guys drafting a law, get over it. People draft laws all the time.

You might be interested in the idea of a delegative democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy

In theory it has the advantages of direct democracy, without requiring telepathy. Of course, that's not necessarily to say that it would work well, but it's an interesting concept at least.

China is a democracy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China

Funny thing is, people say one party system is not a democracy. What about USA's two party system? Both of them have representatives elected by people (baring the violence).

But in both, people can't realistically get a new party in government, let alone run the country. Yet new parties get elected in other parts of the world, even if they don't run the government as a majority.

Our parties change around every half century or so. The US has gone through several rearrangements of parties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Party_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Party_System

We're arguably currently on the sixth one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Party_System

That's not a fair comparsion as the current Chinese party has only been in power 'democratically' since 1949.

That said, my above point is about non ruling party representatives. In Europe, there tends to be more than 5 different parties, showing plenty of voter choice is possible.

The constitution defines China as "a socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants" [1]. It may be "democratic" in the sense that elections are held, but it's not a democracy in the modern sense.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_democratic_dictatorsh...

Intersting, as per your link, the dictatorship is for the people. Seems similar to commander in chief role but without congress?

What is democracy in a modern sense?