Tag: Socialism with Chinese Characteristics

China’s Example and the Need to Rethink Democracy Itself

More than a year ago, OpEdNews’ visionary editor-in-chief, Rob Kall, started a project called the Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA). Its original intent was to offer a progressive alternative to the Republican Project 2025. The latter’s goal is to reduce the federal government to a size (in the words of Republican operative Grover Norquist) that could be drowned in a bathtub.

The AJA agenda would rescue democracy from Norquist’s tub.

But what exactly might that mean in a political environment where the old slogans no longer persuade anyone. Frankly put, “defending democracy” sounds hollow when millions increasingly suspect that what we call democracy has already been purchased, managed, and stage-directed by forces far beyond ordinary citizens’ control.

What I intend to argue here is that if the AJA hopes to become more than another mildly progressive pressure group orbiting around a dying Democratic Party, it must become far more radical in addressing the fact that in terms of “democracy,” the United States is a failed state. It must reform to a system more closely resembling China’s “whole process democracy.”

A Failed Epstein State  

Facing America’s failure might be uncomfortable. However, the facts speak for themselves.  “Our” country is not governed primarily by its voters. Instead, it is run by what might best be called the Epstein Class.

By that phrase I do not mean only the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein himself. Epstein has become symbolic of something much larger — a transnational ruling network of billionaires, intelligence operatives, media owners, financiers, weapons contractors, corporate monopolists, and political fixers whose power transcends elections and party labels.

Others call this network the “Deep State.” But that term can become too vague or conspiratorial. “Epstein Class” points more directly to the fusion of wealth, secrecy, sexual compromise, surveillance, and political immunity characterizing elite power in late capitalism.

The point is not that every billionaire belongs to a secret cabal meeting in underground bunkers. The point is structural. Wealth itself has become sovereign. Under contemporary capitalism, money no longer merely influences politics. It governs politics.

This is why elections change so little.

Wars continue regardless of campaign promises. Wall Street remains untouchable. Pharmaceutical corporations write healthcare policy. Silicon Valley harvests personal data with almost no restraint. Intelligence agencies operate beyond meaningful democratic oversight. Billionaires evade taxes while homelessness explodes beneath the skyscrapers they own.

And yet we are constantly told we live in “the world’s greatest democracy.”

The AJA should challenge that phrase directly.

Because what if the central political issue of our time is not “democracy versus dictatorship,” but rather which class exercises dictatorship?

That was, of course, the insight of Karl Marx. Marx argued that every state ultimately serves one ruling class or another. Under capitalism, democratic institutions often mask what is essentially the dictatorship of wealth. We live under the dictatorship of the Epstein Class.

In America today that dictatorship increasingly stands exposed.

China’s Democracy

Ironically, this is where China enters the conversation in ways many Western progressives still fear to acknowledge.

Western media constantly portrays China as authoritarian. And certainly, the Chinese Communist Party exercises centralized authority in ways foreign to American political culture. But the deeper question is rarely asked: centralized authority on behalf of whom?

China’s defenders argue that the CCP, whatever its flaws, governs primarily in the interests of long-term national and collective development rather than in the interests of an unrestrained billionaire oligarchy.

One need not romanticize China to recognize the force of that claim.

Over the last forty years China has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, constructed immense infrastructure systems, expanded public transportation, modernized entire regions, and maintained long-range national planning capacities almost unimaginable in the contemporary United States.

Meanwhile America’s political system appears increasingly incapable of governing at all.

Bridges collapse. Infrastructure decays. Healthcare bankrupts families. Universities drown students in debt. Entire cities become unaffordable. And yet the billionaire class accumulates wealth on a scale previously unimaginable in human history.

This is why the AJA must begin questioning not simply particular policies, but the very definition of democracy itself.

China’s political system offers at least one important conceptual challenge through its notion of “whole-process democracy.”

Whole Process Democracy

To Western ears the phrase often sounds like propaganda. But its underlying critique of Western liberal democracy deserves serious attention.

Western democracies generally define democracy procedurally: elections, competing parties, free speech, and formal civil rights. Chinese political theory argues that such democracy is incomplete because it leaves economic power largely untouched.

What good is voting, Chinese critics ask, if billionaires own the media, shape public consciousness, finance political campaigns, dominate economic life, and effectively dictate policy no matter which party wins office?

Chinese “whole-process democracy” proposes that democracy should involve continuous public participation throughout governance — consultation, planning, implementation, supervision, and evaluation — not merely occasional voting rituals.

Equally important, Chinese theorists insist democracy must be evaluated not only by procedures but by outcomes: poverty reduction, healthcare, infrastructure, education, housing, stability, and collective well-being. In other words, Chinese democracy is not procedural; it is consequentialist.

Again, one need not idealize China to recognize how devastating this critique becomes when applied to the United States.

Because by those standards, America’s democratic system increasingly looks dysfunctional and oligarchic.

The AJA should say this openly.

Practical Goals

Indeed, the Alliance should become one of the few organizations in the United States willing to demand a redefinition of democracy itself.

That redefinition would begin by acknowledging at least four realities.

  1. Democracy cannot exist where billionaires dominate the economy, media, intelligence structures, and political system simultaneously.
  2. The “free market” has evolved into a form of private tyranny insulated from democratic accountability.
  3. What Americans call “freedom” increasingly means freedom for oligarchs to exploit, speculate, surveil, monopolize, and destabilize society itself.
  4. A functioning democracy requires some form of permanent public authority strong enough to restrain oligarchic power.

This last point is especially difficult for Americans because our political culture has long distrusted centralized authority. Yet history increasingly suggests that Norquist’s bathtub and Project 2025 did not eliminate concentrated power. It merely transferred power into private hands.

Democracy w/ Chinese Characteristics

China’s concept of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” emerged precisely from this recognition. The “Chinese characteristics” refer not only to economics but to China’s deep civilizational traditions emphasizing social harmony, collective responsibility, long-term planning, and state obligation toward public welfare.

Influenced by centuries of Confucius and Confucian political philosophy, Chinese political culture traditionally viewed government not as a neutral referee between competing private interests, but as guardian of social balance and national continuity.

That outlook was reinforced by China’s traumatic “Century of Humiliation,” when foreign powers fragmented, occupied, and exploited the country. From the Chinese perspective, weak government invited chaos, colonization, and national disintegration.

Consequently, modern China developed a system combining market activity with strong state direction over finance, infrastructure, industrial policy, and long-term development.

In this, western critics see authoritarianism. Many Chinese citizens see protection against billionaire fragmentation and social collapse.

Conclusion

The AJA need not endorse every aspect of the Chinese model. But it should have the courage to learn from it.

At minimum, the Alliance should recognize that what presently exists in the United States is not genuine democracy but governance by the Epstein Class — a billionaire oligarchy shielded by intelligence systems, media control, campaign financing, and corporate monopolization.

And once that truth is acknowledged, new political possibilities emerge. Those possibilities include:

  1. Recognition that the real enemy of democracy is the Epstein Class that must be controlled and directed towards serving the rest of us.
  2. This means that democracy should no longer mean merely choosing between competing representatives of the same donor class every four years.
  3. Instead, it should mean collective power over finance, healthcare, media, technology, housing, infrastructure, and long-term social priorities.
  4. In summary, democracy should mean subordinating wealth to human need rather than subordinating human beings to wealth.

The bottom line here is that the central struggle of our century will not be between democracy and dictatorship at all. It is a contest between the dictatorship of billionaire capital and some new democratic form of collective public authority capable of restraining it.

If the Arc of Justice Alliance truly hopes to change America, it must become bold enough to say so. It must directly confront anti-Chinese propaganda and be willing to learn from Chinese experience.

Why China Governs—and America Can’t


Democracy isn’t about elections every four years. It’s about serving the majority—and by that standard, the U.S. is failing while China succeeds.

The ongoing dismantling of the American state under the Trump regime and the Republican blueprint known as Project 2025 does not represent an aberration or a temporary descent into madness. It represents the logical fruition of a political system structurally incapable of governing itself for the long term.

Trump merely makes visible what has long been true: the United States lacks the institutional continuity, political discipline, and moral orientation required to compete with societies capable of sustained planning. In that sense, America is not “falling behind.” It is revealing its nature and vulnerabilities . And that identity increasingly resembles what we once condescendingly labeled the Third World.

To grasp why, we must abandon the illusion that the United States is governed by a coherent state. It is not. It is governed by a revolving door of factions, donors, ideologues, lobbyists, and media spectacles that swing wildly every four to eight years, undoing whatever fragile policy coherence preceded them. Distrust of government is elevated to a civic virtue; sabotage is rebranded as freedom; long-term planning is treated as a threat rather than a necessity.

China operates on the opposite principle. It is governed by a permanent coordinating institution—the Chinese Communist Party—that does not dissolve after elections or permit private plutocrats to hollow out the state when their profits are threatened. One may object to its ideology or criticize its methods, but one cannot deny its structural advantage: it governs continuously. It plans in ten-, fifteen-, and twenty-five-year increments. It treats infrastructure, education, energy, and industrial policy as matters of national survival, not ideological fashion.

That single fact—the presence or absence of a permanent governing authority capable of subordinating private wealth to public purpose—explains nearly everything that follows.

Project 2025 throws the American contrast into stark relief. Its animating impulse is not reform but eradication. Get rid of government. Gut regulatory agencies. Purge the civil service. Replace professional competence with ideological loyalty. Distrust science. Abandon climate research. Defund education and public health. Criminalize critical thought—especially Black, feminist, Indigenous, or Hispanic history—on the grounds that such inquiry undermines patriotism. Schools, in this vision, are meant to produce obedience, not understanding.

Energy policy under this regime borders on parody. Halt solar and wind development. Dismiss climate science as a hoax. Revive “beautiful clean coal,” as if atmospheric chemistry were a branding exercise. Withdraw from international climate agreements.

Meanwhile, China dominates global solar manufacturing, battery technology, rare-earth processing, and electric transportation—not because it is morally superior, but because it decided decades ago that energy transition was inevitable and acted accordingly.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. Arms-control treaties painstakingly negotiated over generations are abandoned on impulse. Nuclear safeguards are weakened. Diplomacy gives way to bullying. Alliances are treated as protection rackets. Institutions created after World War II to stabilize a fragile global order are mocked, hollowed out, or discarded.

Then the pendulum swings. Democrats return to power and timidly attempt to repair the damage. Agencies are restaffed. Climate policy is resurrected. Treaties are reentered. Education funding is restored.

But everyone knows the clock is already ticking. In four or eight years, the reversal will be reversed again. Businesses hesitate. Allies hedge. Long-term investment stalls. Why plan for a future that may be ideologically illegal after the next election?

This is paralysis disguised as democracy.

The only policies that survive these oscillations are those serving the rich and powerful: permanent war, regime change abroad, an ever-expanding military budget, corporate bailouts, and surveillance systems untouched by austerity. On these matters there is bipartisan consensus, because these are the interests of the class that actually governs the United States.

China, meanwhile, continues to move forward—not because it is benevolent, but because it is coherent. High-speed rail networks span the country. Ports, airports, and logistics hubs are built in record time. Universities expand. Technical education is prioritized. Poverty is treated as a social problem to be solved, not a moral failing to be punished.

The results are not theoretical. China has earned repeated recognition from the United Nations for lifting roughly 800 million people out of extreme poverty since the late 1970s—an achievement without historical precedent. This figure appears consistently in UN Development Programme and World Bank assessments. No amount of ideological hostility can erase that record.

Equally striking is the question of legitimacy. Contrary to Western assumptions, governance in China does not rely solely on repression. Long-running surveys conducted by Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance—tracking Chinese public opinion over more than a decade—show consistently high and rising levels of public satisfaction with the national government, often exceeding 90 percent approval.

Compare this with the United States. Pew Research Center and Gallup polling over the past two decades reveal historic lows in trust toward the federal government, with confidence often hovering below 25 percent. Majorities of Americans report believing that elected officials do not care what people like them think, that government serves special interests, and that the political system is fundamentally broken. Decreasing numbers of Americans vote regularly, yet feel powerless. Chinese citizens vote for local officials and report that the permanent national system works.

This forces an uncomfortable question: what do we actually mean by democracy?

If democracy is reduced to the ritual of elections every two to four years—elections dominated by money, media manipulation, and structural exclusion—then the United States qualifies. But if democracy is understood more substantively, as governance that serves the material needs and long-term well-being of the majority, then the American claim collapses. By the testimony of citizens themselves—the people most closely involved—the United States fails at this task. China, by the same measure, succeeds.

This does not mean China is socialist in any classical sense. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” might more accurately be described as capitalism with Chinese characteristics: a hybrid system that tolerates markets while refusing to surrender political authority to them. The crucial word is authority. The Chinese state asserts the right to govern. The American state apologizes for its existence.

Ironically, the United States would need something like its own version of “socialism with American characteristics” to survive: a system that subordinates finance to production, treats health care and education as public goods, plans energy transitions over decades, and insulates core institutions from electoral whiplash. But such a transformation would require exactly what the American system cannot produce: permanent and irreversible investments in national health care, education, climate measures, nuclear disarmament, rent control, day care, labor unions, and wages that keep up with inflation.

Project 2025 is not the cause of American decline. It is the confession. It openly declares that the American right no longer believes in governing—only in dismantling. And because the system permits such nihilism to recur endlessly, because it contains no mechanism for enforcing continuity in the public interest, decline is not merely possible. It is inevitable.

The tragedy is not that China may surpass the United States. Civilizations rise and fall. That is history. The tragedy is that America is choosing decline in the name of freedom while hollowing out the very capacities that make freedom meaningful. A society that cannot plan, cannot remember, and cannot serve its people is not free.

It is merely ungoverned.

And ungoverned societies, no matter how wealthy they once were, eventually come to resemble the Third World they once presumed to lecture.