My later comment was misunderstood. If being ruled by strong Communist leaders is the “political culture” of China, then fine. Give them a choice every few years and they will keep selecting that.
But we all know that the “revolution” needs to maintained by not giving the people the choice. If given a choice, the people might be “fooled” by Western influence and select someone other than the Communists. So the Communists pick all the candidates and then let the people choose only between them.
The fact is that the “political culture” that supposedly backs authoritarianism would not survive free and open elections. The political culture being unwaveringly Communist is a sham and a lie.
Fair point. I just looked into this and what I said was roughly correct: there are indeed somewhat open elections at the local level in China, but further up the pyramid everything is locked down by the Communist Party hierarchy, as you say.
Turns out to be a pretty complicated system in theory, and it must work to some degree because China just had 40 years of incredibly successful development.
