> Ones a democracy one isn’t.
China characterizes itself as a democracy too, just not as a liberal democracy. There are democratic processes, although these are not free in the sense of liberalist ideology. The CCP justifies its control of the elections as a counterbalance to being corrupted by money, which starts to look like not an entirely unreasonable justification.
The CCP narrative also emphasizes "outcome orientation", i.e. that (democratic) legitimacy comes from people being happy about what the governance delivers, not about how it gets chosen. Which again starts to look not totally crazy, given western governments nowadays tend to have dismal approval ratings. And even after taking into account the likely biases in the polling, I do believe the majority of the Chinese truly approve of the CCP.
I'm not a fan of the Chinese system, but I think there are lessons we could take, and a binary "democratic or not" is not a very meaningful categorization.
Just a reminder that the DPRK is "Democratic People's Republic of Korea".
North Korea is a democratic republic!
This is utter nonsense.
Democracy is the idea that people should control their government. The CCP's (and Putin's) notion of "democracy" is something along the lines of "as long as the government controls the people, the people can decide".
Democracy may be a spectrum but China isn't on it, neither in practice nor in spirit. If you have to control the media and prevent free discussion, you aren't practicing democracy.
> Democracy is the idea that people should control their government.
who started the recent war with Iran and war in Vietnam? did those wars started by American people? did those wars got approved by the people of America or their elected representatives?