this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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communist party of china is the preferred nomenclature, communist parties are usually "communist" first and whatever nation state second, see see pee is a western invention, maybe to scare boomers by reminding them of the CCCP but i'm not sure we have a memo or leak about why the switch was made.
people have mentioned older coverage when china was not the big scary enemy where capitalist media referred to the cpc correctly, but i don't have arbitrary 1990s newspaper articles at hand.
presumably how their legislators and executives get their jobs, and who gets to vote would make china a democracy or not?
do you know whether they have elections or how they are held? do you know how proposed laws are considered and declined or instituted? or do you just hear "one party state" and make a pile of assumptions?
ancient athens, the american representative republic, westminster derived parliamentary systems, and school textbook direct democracy aren't the only forms democracy can take, and frankly those systems (except for the school book one that isn't used to run any countries) all have huge flaws and failings, and could fairly be called "not actually democracies" if we look at public opinion polling compared to what public policy is actually made.
yeah i mean that's the school book scenario and one of the flaws with "simple" democracy that has no mechanism to protect women or queer people from christians, slavevs from their owners etc. the democratic process is more than one thing, especially once your association gets too big and you decide to have representatives. Places like china, viet nam, and cuba are democratic but unless you live in a place that does "democratic centralism" you probably weren't taught about that form in school. I certainly wasn't.
that "people's democratic dictatorship" terminology that you seem bothered by is by way of marx's "dictatorship of the bourgeoise" and "dictatorship of the proletariat" and doesn't mean the same thing as "state run by a single dictator". Somebody else can give a better summary but the really bare bones version is that the state is ostensibly putting the interests of the people first and actually controlled by the people, unlike the US which talks a big game about "of the people, by the people, for the people" and then congress never does wildly popular things like legal weed and proper healthcare and does do horridly unpopular things all the time because the rich fucks who own congress benefit.
Keep reading, there's a lot of misconceptions to break and good on you for taking the time.