Wealthy Chinese people can't control what the country does, wealthy Americans certainly have the option if they wanted.

Interestingly enough, the collective net worth of the Chinese leadership is higher than the US leadership by at least an order of magnitude.

> The richest 70 members of China’s legislature added more to their wealth last year than the combined net worth of all 535 members of the U.S. Congress, the president and his Cabinet, and the nine Supreme Court justices.

> The net worth of the 70 richest delegates in China’s National People’s Congress, which opens its annual session on March 5, rose to 565.8 billion yuan ($89.8 billion) in 2011, a gain of $11.5 billion from 2010, according to figures from the Hurun Report, which tracks the country’s wealthy. That compares to the $7.5 billion net worth of all 660 top officials in the three branches of the U.S. government.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-02-26/china-s-b...

So, if anything, wealthy Chinese people exert an even greater degree of control over the political process than wealthy Americans do over theirs.

Yeah, and to think the power a delegate in China's legislature have, you're asked to be a delegate and you show up to a meeting ONCE every 5 year, and rubber stamp 90% of proposals while rejecting 10% of absolutely batshit crazy stuff that some other delegate happened to suggest. Incidentally, everything submitted by the CCP magically falls under that 90% camp, with 2 known exception in the 70 years history of China. Yeah, that's a whole lot of power right there, you got me mate.

Richest Americans don't lower themselves to running for public office.

I think one of the differences is ability to think long term vs attachment to this quarter’s or this year’s bonus.

Short term thinking is really destructive and limiting.