No Stupid Questions

Think of the USA but now remove all political parties and just make One party, remove state governments and make them all federal. So every state has the same laws across the nation. When it's time to vote, democracy is very limited and federally controlled.

Some red flags of the CCP, because this is what trump and maga wants for the US ultimately. A CCDI which purges political rivals. Increased federal control which limits freedom of speech , expression and independent institutions.

Also imagine a HUGE increase in censorship online. Republicans are also doing this now in the US with porn sites as well as locally forcing bibles and the ten commandments in schools.

What's funny though, even with all this Chinese still has a generally free healthcare system for its citizens and pretty good quality of life overall. Something apparently no US leader could ever achieve.

Well that's my understanding of it. I could be wrong about some things. I could be missing some things. I live in the US so I only know what I can research and learn.

Oh boy. I don't think I'm remotely an authority on this and I guess I will be downvoted to hell... but here goes nothing

• PRC (China) is an one-party state led by the communist party (CCP, CPC, Gongchandang... whatever); there is no opposition party because they got driven to Taiwan and became today's ROC. That means, present day the CCP is the Chinese government, and the Chinese government is the CCP. There's no real democracy since there's only one party
• China has always been authoritarian for its entire history. CCP started as a far-left authoritarian Marxist/Leninist party, and later became a... Maoist party. I don't think there is any party currently in the world that is Maoist (probably better to keep it that way), although there could be some fringe Marxist/Leninist parties somewhere
• After Mao died and the subsequent mayhem subsided, the successors still hang on to the communist/socialist naming schemes (where the socialism with Chinese characteristics or something came from), but have mostly adapted a blend of state capitalism and free market capitalism models, especially on the economic front. In practice, that means that China is very free-market, but most of the largest companies are either fully or partially owned by the CCP. The past few chairmen before Xi massively tuned down on the authoritarian scale because no one wanted another Mao. Culturally, Marxism is anti-religion so CCP purged a lot of folk religion and Confucianism, so ironically China might be culturally more progressive than their East Asian neighbors...
• Funnily enough, even though there is no democracy, a lot of Chinese emperors/dictators tried to be benevolent dictators. Because China's social contract is kind of like "we give away our freedom but demand prosperity in return". If China ever becomes not prosperous, the people are known to revolt and overthrow the government; happened a dozen or so times in recorded history. So CCP does still have somewhat of an incentive to try and not screw over its people too much
• China did retain some socialism stuff, notably: planned economy in 5-year increments, citizens technically can't own property (but can "lease" for 70 years...), heavily state-sponsored public infrastructure, universal high-quality education... But at the same time China's actual economy is also insanely unequal and highly resembles a free-market, anything goes model. Again, more like the US than anything else
• On the other side of the equation, the lives of the average citizen in China is... surprisingly similar to those in the US, despite everything. It's just that China basically has their own version of everything the "Western world" has, because China's economy and internet are quite walled off. If anything, maybe Chinese citizens have a bit more of a pent-up anger? Since you are thrown into a metaphorical meat-grinder but can't even protest... I think the pent-up anger shows up on Chinese social media a lot if anyone is interested. But that's pretty much it

I'm not a political scientist so I probably missed a lot... but that's the gist I think. If you are asking about how the actual government is organized, I think Wikipedia explained it way better than anyone on Lemmy could, and honestly it is not as exotic as most would think (there are a lot of parallels to governments of most democracies)

Imagine China as a company. There is a board of directors, and Xi is the head of that board. The board runs a lot of lower ranking boards that control all the aspects of government operation.

Have a problem with your plumbing? Go to your local province or city board. A whole region experiencing drought? The regional board has an action plan that they impose on the local boards to implement with government regional help. Xi is responsible for steering the overarching policy of China moving forward as a country. His role is to say “make China control the South China Sea and receive deference from those countries” to the military, and then it’s their problem to figure out how to harass shipping.

You get promoted to higher boards for good work, and the board votes for its leader. Read Xi’s promotion history. I would die after that many years of office politics, myself.

It's capitalism, but the government does it's job and hammers down companies that get too big to fail

There's also all the one party authoritarian bullshit, but main concept is the government remain the strongest power

I wish I had a source on this, but I heard that bribery of government officials is the norm. They don't get paid much so it's expected they take bribes. But their bosses keep them in line. And the weird thing is that it actually works kind of well to make sure things get done, compared to the gridlock faced when trying to build houses or public transit in most cities in the US.

I don't know. However I do see China able to pull their country together and achieve more as people are aligned, be it forced or not, having a common goal allows the country to do things other countries struggle with. Like the push for in house technologies and cheap renewable energy.

I feel like Western countries are grid locked in turmoil and in-fighting which prevents progress.