US or China, which is truly democratic? American oligarchy vs Chinese 'consultative democracy'

While scholars conclude that the USA is an oligarchy run by big corporations, China has developed a unique system of "whole-process people's democracy". This is how it works.

By Simon Turner

Participants in the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) in 2018

Who do we want to lead? With genocide ongoing, regional wars brewing, and climate change records breaking, who is a safe pair of hands?

Today a choice exists; an alternative to the US-led international order is being built, with China at its center.

A Western pollster, Edelman Trust Barometer, found China to be the country rated highest globally in terms of people’s trust in their government. 

China has held the top spot every year but one since 2018, with a comprehensive trust index of 79 in 2024. The US is down at a mere 46.

The people of the US are at a disadvantage, however. How can their trust in government be strong under a duopoly system that is most convincing when the population is the most polarized? That the governments in such a system based on divide-and-conquer cannot reach China's approval rating is practically built in.

The November US election was supposed to be the toughest test yet for “lesser-evil” voting. Donald Trump — who was so supportive of Israel he moved the US embassy to occupied Jerusalem, in violation of international law — was to compete against Genocide Joe — who kept the embassy there, while arming Israel as it massacred Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Instead, Kamala Harris took Biden’s place. She aligns with the Republicans on the genocidal Israeli regime, and today bears responsibility for its crimes, second only to Biden. But we are told she represents change.

According to a famous study co-authored by scholars at Princeton and Northwestern University, citizen participation in the process of US liberal democracy has “little or no independent influence” on government policy.

Conforming more to an oligarchic model, it is US “elites and organized groups representing business interests” that “have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy”, the experts concluded.

In China, on the other hand, the elites and organized groups representing business interests are kept below, subordinated to the government. What Western critics call an “authoritarian” system is actually a different form of democracy, run not on behalf of a wealthy minority, but rather “in the interests of the great majority”.

Although China’s former leader Deng Xiaoping did allow market forces into the country, starting with the reform and opening up of 1978, he insisted that the state would control them. Deng said of markets, “If they serve socialism they are socialist; if they serve capitalism, they are capitalist".

In the United States, however, politicians don’t listen to the people. And why would they? How can the system be a “representative democracy” when a candidate can’t win an election without a great deal of money?

US politicians know whom they need to please. As the academic study on US oligarchy showed, in Washington’s so-called “representative democracy”, the only ones truly represented are big business.

China really is different.

China’s system of “consultative democracy”

In China, citizen participation and representation are actively sought, and channels have been set up for this purpose.

China’s “Message Board for Leaders” (MBL) platform connects the general population to local and ministry-level government officials. From its launch in 2006 to 2021, the “major’s mailbox” had already handled more than 2.3 million demands, concerns, and complaints. 

Another nationwide Chinese government initiative, the 12345 hotline, fields more than 50,000 contacts a day in Beijing alone via telephone, internet, and new media, addressing issues of everyday life. Over 85% of concerns are resolved.

Using this initiative to then act on popular feedback, Beijing included in its 2022 priority list 17 “major frustrations” of local residents. Among these were insufficient elevators in old buildings and inadequate residential property services. Almost 100 policies were subsequently introduced and more than 400 key tasks were completed. As for the elevators, 1,322 were installed.

In such ways, the Chinese government follows the principle of “from the people to the people” (or “from the masses to the masses”). Moreover, MBL, 12345, and the many other official platforms represent a technologically modern way of amplifying the voice of the people.

In the contemporary era, China’s President’s Xi Jinping emphasizes the importance of what he calls “consultative democracy”. Xi wrote in his 2014 book The Governance of China (Volume 2) that consultative democracy “is an important embodiment of the Party's mass line”.

“We need to take advantage of every mechanism, every channel, and every method to conduct extensive consultations on the major issues of reform, development, and stability, and especially on the issues that have a bearing on people’s immediate interests”, Xi said.

The Communist Party of China put this into practice in 2020, when the draft of its 14th Five-Year Plan (from 2021 to 2025) was submitted to public consultation online for the first time. The general public was able to participate in planning its own social and economic development, making more than a million suggestions from August 16 to 29, 2020, from which over 1,000 opinions and suggestions were incorporated.

Facilitating the transfer of information is the rapid development of new technologies. Chen Liang, associate professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s School of Marxism, explained:

"The opinions, views, and demands of the people can be digitized, visualized and contextualized, and the efficiency, precision and scientific nature of democratic decision-making can be continuously improved. … The people can express their views and opinions quickly, across regions and at low-cost, and exert influence on grassroots, regional and even national political and social life”.

In 2016, President Xi had set the stage, stating that Party cadres “must learn to follow the mass line through the internet … [and] understand what the masses think and hope, collect good ideas and good suggestions, and actively respond to netizens’ concerns”.

For the less tech-aware, Party-Masses Service Centers are available, from the smallest villages to the large city blocks of Shanghai. These feature distinct white and red colors, and invite anyone to come with a complaint or suggestion. 

China has also created local legislative liaison stations, where “grassroots deputies discuss legislative drafts and collect suggestions from the public”.

There are 45 national and 6,500 provincial and municipal "through trains" that connect ordinary people to China’s highest legislative office, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC). Local legislative liaison stations serve as contact points and collection centers for public opinion on draft national legislation.

From the launch of the offices in July 2015 to November 2023, more than 3,100 ideas on forming or revising national legislation were incorporated. 

The ambition to find further ways to serve the people was made clear in a speech that President Xi delivered honoring the 60th anniversary of the NPC:

“We must expand people's democracy by improving democratic systems, enriching forms of democracy, and creating more channels for the practice of democracy, and enable broader, orderly political participation of citizens at all levels and in all domains, with a view to developing a people's democracy that is wide in scope, full in substance, and refined in practice.

“In all of the country's initiatives, we must implement the Party's mass line, build close links with the people, reach out to them, respond to their expectations, and resolve problems that are of the greatest, most direct, and most practical concern to them, in an effort to pool the wisdom and strength of the broadest possible majority of the people”.

China’s “thorough cleanup” of corruption

Soon after he became the new president of China in 2013, Xi Jinping launched a crackdown on corruption. In this “mass line campaign”, referred to as a “thorough cleanup”, Xi sought to address long-standing problems in the country, targeting the “four forms of decadence”: “formalism, bureaucratism, hedonism, and extravagance”.

At a study session of provincial and ministerial-level officials in 2022, Xi reprised the theme, saying, “All Party members should always maintain close ties with the people, and accept the criticism and oversight of the people”.

These were no empty words. The anti-corruption campaign was very serious.

A former vice-mayor in Shanxi province, Zhang Zhongsheng, for instance, was given a life sentence in prison for accepting 1.04 billion yuan ($160 million) in bribes.

No one in China is above the law. Even China’s former Justice Minister Tang Yijun found he was not too privileged to be immune. In 2024, anti-corruption authorities announced he was “being investigated for suspected severe violations of the discipline and law”.

Another former justice minister, Fu Zhenghua, was jailed with a suspended death sentence for corruption in 2022.

The graft-busting campaign shows no special leniency to those who, with the most power and authority, are therefore most responsible to the people.

The anti-corruption policy has been pursued with the resolve to “offend a few thousand rather than fail 1.4 billion”.

The Communist Party of China understands that the principle of “from the people to the people” would suffer in its application if the people's representatives were not close to and focused on them, but were rather prioritizing themselves over the people they serve.

Consequently, as President Xi has stressed, those who have power must have responsibility, those who have responsibility must take responsibility, and those who fail to fulfill their responsibilities must be held accountable.

Other examples include Zhang Hongli, former senior executive vice president at the world’s biggest bank by consolidated assets, the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC). Zhang was arrested for taking bribes.

Lou Wenlong, a former vice president of the world’s third-biggest bank, the state-owned Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), was also placed under investigation for corruption.

It is almost impossible to imagine senior executives of large US banks on Wall Street being arrested for corruption. (In fact, they crashed the economy in 2008, only to be bailed out by the government.)

Instead, as the watchdog website Wall Street on Parade wrote, despite five felony counts, JPMorgan Chase CEO “Jamie Dimon is allowed to remain at the helm of this federally-insured bank despite his presiding over the worst banking scandals in U.S. history”.

In 2023, the United States saw the second-biggest bank collapse in its history, as First Republic Bank crashed. Can you guess which bank was entrusted with more than $200 billion in First Republic assets, and realized an almost $3 billion profit on the deal? You guessed it: JPMorgan Chase.

Unlike JPMorgan, however, China’s large banks like ICBC and ABC are state-owned enterprises (SOEs), under the control of the government, and therefore the people.

For the “healthy development” of capital, President Xi has stressed, “We must be well aware that profit-seeking as capital’s intrinsic nature must be subject to regulation and constraints; otherwise, capital’s unbridled development will cause inestimable damage to our country’s economic and social development”.

Economist Michael Hudson argues that China’s control over capital is precisely why it is demonized as “authoritarian” in the West.

“There’s only one way to prevent an oligarchy from developing as people get richer and richer, and that’s to have a strong state”, Hudson said. “You need a strong central state in order to have a democracy. [But] Americans call that socialism, and they say that’s the antithesis of democracy, which means a state that is loyal to the United States and follows US policy and lets the US banks financialize the economy”.

In the US, it was not only Republican President Ronald Reagan but also Democratic President Bill Clinton who declared that “the era of big government is over”. Instead, big capital is in charge.

China, on the other hand, disciplines, guides, and even controls big capital, on behalf of the people.

Violence, crime, and surveillance

When debating the state of US “democracy”, one cannot forget the brutal violence of the US state.

In the US, police have killed more than 1,000 North Americans annually for the last decade, with 1,247 victims in 2023.

Many US police departments train with the Israeli apartheid regime, borrowing tactics it uses against the occupied Palestinian people.

Every 6.6 hours in 2023, there was a police killing in the United States. In China, there were none at all, and haven’t been in years.

Once again, the Chinese people have a voice in the supervision of the security organs. The Ministry for Public Security's general provision leads with the importance of the acceptance of the people's supervision by those security organs via their "petition work".

Petition work in China (or "letters and calls”) is another term for citizens contacting government agencies, offering suggestions, opinions, or complaints to be handled by the relevant authorities.

According to the 2022 government regulatory document:

"For initial petitions in the form of suggestions and opinions, those that are conducive to perfecting policies, improving work, and promoting economic and social development shall be reported to the Party committee or government at the same level for reference in decision-making, or forwarded to the organs or units that have the power to handle the matter for study”.

As for China's police, the provisions state:

"Public security petition work is an important part of the public security organs' mass work. It is an important task for the public security organs to understand social conditions and public opinion, listen to opinions and suggestions, test the quality and effectiveness of law enforcement, and safeguard the rights and interests of the masses. It is an important way for the public security organs to accept mass supervision, improve law enforcement standards, improve work style, and strengthen team building”.

Supervision of China’s government by its people, or “mass supervision”, is totally unfamiliar in the West, and might be misread as surveillance. 

China does have pervasive surveillance, and the result is that the country is extremely safe, with almost no violence crime. The United States also has pervasive surveillance, but it is extremely violent. On behalf of whom, then, is each government watching?

How China’s elections work

An answer may be found in analyzing the profound differences between China and the US on the role of money in politics, and how it skews democracy.

China does have elections, and for genuine representation, no lobbying or canvassing is allowed.

Following the precepts of democratic elections, “In accordance with the principles of universal suffrage, equal rights, multiple candidates, and secret ballot”, deputies to people’s congresses at the township and county levels are elected by the Chinese people.

These representatives, the deputies closest to the public, make up 94% of the national total, and are entrusted with electing the higher-level representatives. The deputies to people's congresses at the level of townships and counties elect deputies to people's congresses of cities; they, in turn, elect deputies at the provincial level, who elect deputies at the national level.

From these grassroots onward, in China, it is meritocracy all the way. Decades of practical experience, usually with increasingly large populations, ensures progressively greater competence, as candidates get the top jobs that require such capacity.

At each level, China's most important consultative body, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the government's main "think tank," advises the NPC on how to better serve the people. 

In the annual “Two Sessions”, held every March, the NPC and CPPCC meet to map out the country's development path.

The CPPCC acts as a further bridge between the government and the people, with 34 interest groups representing a broad swath of Chinese society. They produce reports, give feedback, and offer proposals and insight for the public good.

In one case from 2013, the Chinese Peasants and Workers Democratic Party, one of China's eight non-communist parties, proposed the formation of a national-level coordinated network to tackle air pollution.

China then proceeded from its Air Pollution and Control Action Plan to achieve a historic reduction of 35-40% in particulate matter air pollution by 2017.

China’s environmental protections and “green GDP”

In her book Will China Save the Planet?, prominent US environmentalist Barbara Finamore described how China “launched its moon shot in earnest”, offering the most generous purchase subsidies for electric vehicles (officially known as new energy vehicles) out of any country on Earth, other than Norway (which has 0.4% of China’s population).

China’s consultative focus on the environment has only intensified since. The representative groups of the CPPCC chose a proposal to lower carbon emissions in the construction field as its proposal for 2022. At the same time, the "environment and natural resources group" became the first new group to be added to the body since 1993.

It was back in the early 1990s that the Chinese government set up its environmental complaint system. From the period 2001 to 2006, the ratio of the local environmental authorities' responses to complaints by letters averaged 86-96%, and the ratio of responses to visits was 75-86%.

Xi Jinping previously served as secretary of the Zhejiang Province’s Communist Party Committee, and its highest-ranking official. In 2005, Xi pushed for "not only GDP but also green GDP", as he described it in his newspaper column. In a green GDP accounting pilot, only Zhejiang and one other province finally published their results.

By 2010, scholars determined that China's environmental complaint system was succeeding as a "direct connection from the public to the government, employing a ‘closed-loop’ working mechanism involving reporting, acceptance, disposal, and feedback”.

Another channel, the 12369 telephone complaint hotline, was launched in 2009 to further enable public reporting of environmental pollution problems.

In 2015, China’s ubiquitous WeChat messaging app joined in with environmental complaints reporting, bringing the system online in 2017, and “significantly enhancing public participation in reporting environmental concerns”, wrote top academics.

As for government responsiveness, “when analyzing panel data from 295 Chinese cities between 2018 and 2020, the results indicate that environmental complaint reporting significantly contributes to the enhancement of atmospheric environmental quality”, concluded scientific experts.

David Fishman, an expert on China’s energy sector, observed in July that, "as long as the trend for the last few months of declining YoY coal consumption continues, then July 2024 will use less coal than July 2023, ensuring July 2023 goes down in the history books as China's all-time coal peak”.

This is particularly important considering that the hottest day globally ever recorded was in July.

Already back in 2015, China had achieved "undisputed leadership” in the development of renewable energy, according to UN climate chief Christiana Figueres.

The US was "playing catch-up", even though, as Olivier Petitjean of the Multinationals Observatory has put it, "You can't hope to tackle the climate crisis without tackling corporate power" — something that the US government can’t be expected to do.

China has faced pushback from fossil fuel interests, too. But this has been less because of corporate greed than because of operators struggling to make a living amid climate change extremes running up against procedural boundaries.

In 2021, “they were buying coal for a really high price and they're selling power for a fixed low price”, Fishman explained. “And we ended up with these massive blackouts or brownouts across the country in late 2021 with coal generators, lots of capacity, but unable to actually generate enough cash to buy coal and refill their stocks to generate”.

This only further incentivizes China to forge ahead in the transition to renewable energy technologies. And with big capital kept below the government, the fossil fuel industry in China has nothing like the power to resist change that it has in the US.

To make space for renewables, flexibility retrofits will have coal-fired plants in most areas able to ramp down from full capacity all the way to under 30%, and back, across intervals of 8-10 hours, or so. They already receive capacity payments for national security reasons to cover their losses, while generating less than necessary otherwise, and are looking at a future of decline.

So Chinese government intervention for the public good can be seen not only in the commitment to investment in EVs, but also the clean-up of the residential power supply source.

Meanwhile, the US has responded with 100% tariffs on China's EVs and 50% duties on its solar panels.

US imperialism vs Chinese socialism

The truth about Chinese socialism, as opposed to US imperialism, is that China's priority is domestic policy. Its focus is on its people, as epitomized by the mass line policy. From the people to the people; democracy is fundamental.

In fact, President Xi has insisted, “Without democracy, there would be no socialism, socialist modernization, or national rejuvenation”.

While China keeps its army at home, where its people are, US politicians on both sides of the same electoral coin are supporting the genocidal Israeli regime as it massacres Palestinian children, in an attempt to advance US imperial interests in West Asia.

The US government is not ultimately concerned about “legitimacy”, because the North American people have been denied a system of consultative democracy.

The US government is instead focused on maximizing corporate profits, privatizing public institutions, and preparing for more war.

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Author

Simon Turner is a writer and geopolitical analyst based in the Netherlands. He is a contributor to Orinoco Tribune and Popular Resistance.