This is not some middle manager's sensibility. This is a deliberate inner propaganda policy. When chinese people ask: "What we are fighting for there?", they can open the map and see some big island and not the shit of a fly visible only under a microscope.

As a Chinese I don't need to open maps or search how large the island is, I learn that it is a tiny one from (printed) newspapers years ago.

OTOH I don't have much confidence in the middle manager theory, either.

Because China is a dictatorship, it is OK to be seen as a single coherent entity, in my opinion.

Just as in any large political system, China cannot be entirely controlled centrally. There are three or four levels of regional and local control below the centre. It would be impossible for Beijing to administer all of that detail.

In foreign affairs, Beijing is sovereign - including anything related to the Senkaku / Diaoyu islands which are presently owned by Japan. So in this respect you are right.

For local matters, there is considerable flexibility and internal conflict. Currently, Beijing encourages citizens to find fault and report administrative issues at local levels, but will brook no dissent of its own management. In domestic administration China is less coherent than your claim.

All of the above could be equally true in a non-authoritarian form of government. I would argue that China's authoritarian politics are largely orthogonal to its degree of federation.

>For local matters, there is considerable flexibility and internal conflict. Currently, Beijing encourages citizens to find fault and report administrative issues at local levels, but will brook no dissent of its own management. In domestic administration China is less coherent than your claim.

Your social credit score will go down if you do.

China has over a billion people: true, but everything is under the control of CCP. So for anyone outside China, it is one coherent entity which is the CCP.

In a single party system, one entity as large as CCP can never be "coherent": you'll always have people pulling in different directions.

Agree ... there are always factions etc and all these factions may manifest power within china, but external to China, CCP at projects a coherent facade unlike other democracies.

China is not a democracy

Even political scientists disagree what makes a "democracy" today.

I am pretty sure China considers itself a "democracy" in the original meaning of the word: "rule of the people" (thus the focus on "People" in "People's Republic of China" and in many other official names). Basically, anyone can rise to power by going through the ranks of the communist party, and people are elected and voted for.

I wouldn't consider it a democracy even in that basic sense because of the disregard for basic human rights and freedoms, and it surely is not one in the modern political sense of multi-party systems.

Similarly, one could argue that the de-facto two-party system in the USA is not very democratic either, as it's not unlike a single-party system in China: you go through the ranks of the *party* to progress. It's the other things that make USA more of a democracy (freedom of speech and protections against unsubstantiated persecution, for example, and sure, ability to start a party too — even if it's inconsequential).

If any country can be treated as a coherent entity, it's China.