North Korea also declares itself "democratic", just to add to the parent.

It's a bit different with China. China has a mandated one party system, but as for individuals they do have normal and fair elections that I think even the US could learn something from. Basically at the smallest segment of society you have groups of something like 2000 people who have a local elected representative who has significant power to actually get things done. Those representatives then elect representatives at a higher tier, and so on up until you have the Politburo Standing Committee electing the President/Secretary of the CCP.

I think this system is pretty nice in lots of ways because it lets local representatives focus on local things, while high level representatives can focus on broad national interests. It also means peoples votes are always extremely important and you're going to be quite 'close' (literally and figuratively) to your representative. Of course the obvious downside is that in China you don't even get to directly vote for the President, but on the other hand - that is similar to many parliamentary systems used throughout Europe. Anyhow, it's an interesting system! Our first past the post district based system is completely broken and dysfunctional, but the people most benefited from it are the only ones who could fix it, so it's not going anywhere anytime soon. But it's fun to at least consider alternatives!

The funny part is that they give you something like 31 names and tell you to pick 30 of them that you want to be elected (so one person gets left out). Early in his career, Xi Jinping actually lost his only direct election this way (they ignored the results and gave him the post anyways). Even at the lowest level, there are definitely never any one on one elections where two people can campaign for the same office, the system doesn't allow for that.

> This [1] is the first paragraph of the first article of their constitution: "The People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.

Technically, freedom of speech, religion, press is guaranteed in the Chinese constitution. But China is not a rule of law country so these rights are not enforced in any manner beyond how the government sees fit.