One Party Communist China pretends it has gone past democracy with this horse hockey:
"China's whole-process people's democracy integrates process-oriented democracy with results-oriented democracy, procedural democracy with substantive democracy, direct democracy with indirect democracy and people's democracy with the will of the state."
I thought their deal for citizens was economic freedom. The Chinese are just another version of earthly government managers looking for their own interests.
Citizen input will be constrained to surveys designed by the government, not by the people. U.S. workers have completed enough employment surveys that provide no space for feedback on the workplace crap sandwich they must eat every day.
Meanwhile at home, it's the Insane Reds vs. the Blue Lucys. I'm beginning to wonder if any middle remains. U.S. democracy has become disturbingly cartoonish under the sponsorship of Red and Blue oligarchs.
We have the freedom for obscenely wealthy, politically connected private equity chiefs to pay preferred carried interest taxation. Both the Reds and Blues have long promised to eliminate the tax break on the campaign trail but it never translates to actual law.
We have the freedom for 30% of the Christian population to push their version of the faith into local, state and national law.
We have elected officials of poor character more concerned about their position/image than the plight of the average citizen.
None of that sounds representative, but at least we have the option to vote them out. Chinese survey participants may end up like the U.S. employee who foolishly thought their employer wanted their opinion. What's the nondemocratic version of a Chinese firing?
Update 10-23-22: The Saudi government sponsored Future Investment Conference showed how surveys can steer people away from gross human rights abuses.
The FII Institute called the New York gathering the Priority Conference, and it centered on the release of a 13-country survey of 130,000 respondents’ attitudes that the institute says represents half of the world’s population. The institute asked them: What’s your top priority? It’s an incredible feat of denial done in the service of reframing the conversation away from politics and rights. Of course, one might imagine that many people’s top priority is to live freely and not be murdered.
