When you hear the name of the country “China”, what is your immediate reaction?

It’s an authoritarian, aggressive state that oppresses its citizens, perhaps.

If so, you are responding with a knee-jerk, ill-informed reaction, not really your fault, it’s the diet you have been fed, and the purpose of this article is first to try to persuade you to think otherwise, and then to describe what life is really like, from someone who actually lives there, experiencing it on a daily basis.

Well, where to begin?

Let’s start then with that (1) undemocratic state which (2) oppresses its citizens with its “social credit scores”, and is (3) an aggressive threat on the world stage.

Chinese democracy

I have to laugh when British people accuse China of being undemocratic. The UK has an unelected head of state (a king), an unelected upper chamber, and in the recent past had as prime minister an MP elected to the post by nobody (he was unopposed), and a foreign secretary a “lord” who wasn’t even elected as an MP at all. In recent years it has had a string of leaders each worse than the last, one of whom was forced to resign after 45 days having precipitated a financial crisis. The electoral system enabled the present ruling party to win a landslide with one vote from every five electors, so the vast majority of voters are completely unrepresented: clearly it has no democratic mandate whatsoever. The two major parties are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, so the idea that there is some choice is pure fantasy. This, then is the benchmark against which I study the Chinese system.

How to organize a democracy in a population of 1.4 billion, some 20 times that of the UK? China does it by arranging successive layers of government, each one more or less selected by the layer below. I had a rough idea of how it works, but I asked Deepseek to give me a summary of how representation works in practice:

China’s Five Layers of Elected Representation

1. The National People’s Congress (NPC)

The highest tier: about 3,000 delegates elected by lower-level bodies, it meets annually to ratify laws/policies.

2. Provincial/Municipal People’s Congresses

Delegates are elected by city/county-level congresses.

3. City/County-Level people’s congresses’ delegates are nominally elected by township-level congresses or public votes.

4. Township/Town-Level People’s Congresses

Direct public elections take place.

5. Village Committees (Rural) / Neighborhood Committees (Urban)

They oversee local affairs. Village elections allow public voting too.

Key Notes on elections in China

No multiparty competition: all candidates are approved by the Communist Party of China (CPC) or its united front organisations. Indirect hierarchy: lower bodies elect higher ones, but the Party controls nominations at every level.

Symbolic vs. real power: The NPC and local congresses primarily endorse decisions made by the party’s Politburo Standing Committee (the PSC, China’s true ruling body).

Now it is becoming clearer. So I asked: how is the PSC chosen?

Deepseek started to reply and then abruptly stopped and asked me to turn to something else. So I had to use Firefox and Firefox referred me to the BBC. The PSC currently has seven members: Li Qiang, Zhao Leji, Wang Huning, Cai Qi, Ding Xuexiang, Li Xi, and Xi Jinping himself. All except Xi in their sixties.

And how is the PSC chosen? From the Politburo which consists of 24 members.

And how the Politburo is chosen is something of a mystery. So now we arrive at the heart of the matter: all power truly rests within the Party. Not very democratic: but this no different at all from the way affairs are run in the UK where:

1 The parties choose their candidates

2 The parties choose their leader

3 In the electorally successful party the leader becomes prime minister

4 The prime minister chooses his cabinet of ministers.

Same as China inasmuch as the public has no say in any of these matters.

Yet in the UK, at least they can change the party, you will say? Well, welcome to the new boss, same as the old boss. You are just evicting one set of snouts from the trough and letting in another, as Paul Foot once remarked. But finally it has to be said when considering their performances in recent decades that China’s governance demonstrably works, and the UK’s clearly doesn’t.

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