China = Communist?

Is China really Communist or are they Democratic?  They hold elections, they have parties other than the CCP. It just so happens that the CCP has the most members.

They are both... or bothish
It's
Communism vs. Capitalism

and

Democracy vs. well, any form of government not elected by it's people, usually Dictatorships, Monarchies, Totalitarian and Marshall Regimes, etc.

not

Communism vs. Democracy.  These terms were deliberately confused during the cold war by propagandists.


The most interesting thing to me about China is that though their political freedom is controlled, their personal freedom is, in many ways, greater than that in the west.

>>2
The most interesting thing to me about China is that though their political freedom is controlled, their personal freedom is, in many ways, greater than that in the west.
WTF are you talking about? How so?

>>3
One of my favorite China stories, I lived there for a little more than two years, is this:  I lived at the end of a toll road that the Central govt. had built some years ago.  Like in the US they said "Hey folks, we're gonna build this nice road and charge a toll to pay for it.  When we've made our money back, we'll stop charging the toll.  Like in the US, the time came and went and the toll booths remained.  The local communities complaints went unanswered so one day, hundreds of people got together, took some heavy equipment, politely asked the toll collectors to vacate the booths, and tore them from the road.  I'd like to see something like that happen here.  Though not really 'cause I think people would die. 
The Chinese are the masters of minding their own business.  See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.  The Chinese don't call the police because of something their neighbors are doing.  The police are more often called in to mediate disputes with government agencies. 
     In the USA we are a mix of cultures and social norms so in order to function we have agreed that the law will be the bottom line.  In China, there's a highly socialized culture that's so old it knows that laws and governments come and go.  It's your social position that matters, and a stand up kind of person can do pretty much anything he wants.  The best example is driving.  They have all the same traffic laws as the West, but they are rarely paid attention to.  Instead the people interact as traffic.  If somebody's going fast, let 'em pass.  If somebody's going slow, go around them.  If the lights red but nobody's around, go through it.  There's no camera.  It's trained on Tiananmen Square making sure some kids not raising a Free Tibet Banner.
Sorry for the tl;dr, but you did ask.

China is more like the constitutional monarchies of the 19th century, with a political elite at the top who could pretty much rule by decree but who have connections with the nouveau riche, a culture of noblesse oblige and knowledge of the balance of power between the classes which prevent them from "rocking the boat".

CCP is a former communist party that pulled off some ideological sleight of hand (ie 'Communism with Chinese Characteristics') in order to achieve capitalist reform during the Deng years. Mainland Chinese aren't really ideological compared to Overseas Chinese so they don't really care that the CCP no longers stands for its original purpose.

>>4
Again this is no different from the laissez faire approach of the 19th century, the government didn't want to spend much money administering the masses so they pretty much just gave them an area of land and left them to their own devices only intervening when it began to affect them. As the demand for labour increased and crime, disease and poverty kept incapacitating skilled labourers the government gradually introduced more and more public services, the progress of London as the first modern city is probably a text book example of this.

>>6
There's a saying in Russia "In the east communism is a dinosaur fossil, in the west it's a yapping chihuahua.".

>>7
It's very different. 
There are plenty of public services in place, like health care and public transportation, and there is considerable oversight of land use.  The difference is, as I stated, the Chinese society/culture, and the Chinese government address different aspects of the sociology.  Comparisons to the west are of little use in understanding China.  >>6,8 are great points.  >>5,7 are apples to oranges.

>>9
The only differences are new technologies which mean public services such as medicine are cheaper and more effective, in terms of human behaviour which has not changed significantly there is little change, there are plenty of examples of angry mobs taking the law into their own hands in the 19th century when westerners were about as wealthy as modern Chinamen. There is little change in the structure of society either, there is plenty of nepotism in the Chinese state analogous to the european aristocracy, plenty of nouveau riche aswell.

>>10
You're equivocating.  You seem to have considerable information about China, and little understanding, like someone who's read some books written by Westerners and watched TV, perhaps even visited, but never lived there.  Attempting to explain the behavior of a 4000 year old culture based on the last 200 years of your own shows a limited perspective, and the kind of arrogance and cultural conceit that precipitates conflict.

>>11
Culture is not some kind of sacred inviolable entity, it's just a bunch of ideas. I'm sure the Chinese have many good ideas that we decadent western materialist capitalist pigs could learn from but for the most part we share the vast bulk of ideas since most are not tangents like fashion, tradition or cuisine, they are self-evident or so important that a culture that rejects them will die off.

One of these ideas is the concept of community and cooperating for mutual gain, implemented both by the Chinese community that tore down the toll booth and the Boston tea party in 1773.

China is more like the idea of Communism that Lenin had.

wat

>13

No China is not >:(. China is market socialist, Lenin was a full Communist. China hasn't been communist since good ol' Mao died

>>15
No one in the CPC gives a fuck about communism or socialism.

>>16

wat?

>>17
Itr's true, they are state capitalist now, an improvement over communism but still as evil as the federal reserve.

no, it's pretty much national socialism.

>>19
Socialism is little different in practice from state capitalism, probably the only difference is that socialists are obliged to hand out a token level of welfare.

I always hear people saying that the Chinese protesters at Tian An Men were protesting for MORE communism..  They never cite sources though..

What exactly were they protesting for?

>>21
Democratic reform.

>>22

According to those people, if you believe it was for democratic reform then you are just believing what fox news feeds you.

>>23
The majority of protestors supported the late CPC old guard Hu Yaobang who believed in the one party state but wanted to expand the people's congress, local government and basic freedoms like free speech.

The Chinese government is a form of Oligarchical Collectivism. Not necessarily in the police state way, but in the true sense of what those two terms mean.

China is a communist country, you could even call it a stalinist country with their ridiculous Mao worshipping cult.

>>26 WRONG! Fucking retard. Read the Communist Manifesto that describes what Communism is. Then look at China and how it is governed. You will see they are run quite differently.

>>27
I think it's pretty obvious that communism doesn't work in theory.

>>27
Communism will never work because it is a flawed concept.

China is not so great as the media makes it sound. Corruption is a serious problem in China, China is composed of over 50 ethnic groups and they all hate each other and they especially hate the Han people.

Most of the Chinese people are still piss poor.

Anyone who isn't an idiot would know that Mao isn't loved as much as we was in the past, even the CCP's stance is that he made 'mistakes'. Deng Xiaoping is the new idol for the new capitalist era.

>>29
Well it's certainly done a marvelous job of keeping them docile, I bet they'd do a much better job in Afghanistan than us.