Several friends have sent me this article by @Lingling_Wei so I’ll give my two cents. I agree, American socialism isn’t Chinese socialism. But I’d go further. I’ve always found it inadequate to describe China using what amounts to 20th century western political vocabulary. They don’t fit, because we’ve had our own wholly distinct political evolution over millennia. Our “total, centralised, one-party control” isn’t “socialism” manifested, but the product of our own trajectory. The massive centralised bureaucracy traces back to the Han dynasty. It’s not a socialist invention. We discovered long ago that it is necessary, for when we were decentralised, we tend to end up in the throes of chaos. The idea that communal/state interest supersedes the individual’s has long been the accepted norm, consistent with Confucian philosophy - 大义over小义. (I don’t agree with this, merely noting the provenance.) If one must assign China an “ism”, it ought to be PRAGMATISM. It’s obviously not communism - we ran that experiment, endured the carnage, and emerged with a rather informed opinion on the subject. And though we’ve kept the name, I’ve been taught that the singular motivation of the first CCP revolutionaries was to create prosperity, not to implement communism per se. Anyway, China has been debating matters of statecraft, legitimacy, and the accountability of powers since the warring states period. There’s much to be said about how our political history has evolved - and it remains an ongoing process. But when I hear people judging China based solely on western frameworks, I have to respectively push back. It’s like critiquing Peking Opera as if it were a Broadway musical.