China: Communist, Dictatorship, Capitalist or Democratic?

There are still many people, outside of China, who think China is a communist, dictatorship country.

China is communist by name only.  It is not communist and it does not have a dictatorship.

Many people tend to confuse political with economic systems.  Communism, like socialism and capitalism, is mainly an economic system.  Democracy, dictatorship, totalitarianism and authoritarianism are political systems.

You can mix economic systems with different political systems.  As an example, a country can have communism with democracy, or capitalism with dictatorship or socialism with authoritarianism.

China was capitalistic for most of its approximately 4,000 year history.  It veered off into communism for a short while in 1949, when their Communist Party of China won their civil war.  They have not changed their party name, but they changed their economic system since then.  They started introducing capitalism in 1979 (source).  Since then, China phased in more and more capitalist systems and is now more capitalistic than the West in many ways:

• Lower taxes
• income and sales taxes
• Less socialist programs with very little or no subsidies for:
• elementary, high schools, universities
• healthcare
• unemployment insurance
• welfare
• manipulation of the housing market (Washington had a policy to enable every American to realize the American dream of homeownership)

Since China stated "to get rich is glorious", the number of entrepreneurs exploded.  Entrepreneurs exist mainly in capitalist societies, less so in socialist societies and essentially none in communist societies.  Entrepreneurs start businesses and are the main, or only creators of wealth for any society.

China had a totalitarian political system under Chairman Mao Zedong.  However, they now have an authoritarian political system under their one party rule with democracy at the local levels.  Many outsiders are right to be critical of a country with only one political party that controls the media and limits political freedom.  The positive side is that their political party is the largest in the world, with 80 million members.  Also, it holds elections every 5 years, where the party members vote in a new President (source) to serve a single 5 year term.  Therefore, China's leaders can change more often than leaders in the West where Presidents or Prime Ministers can serve multiple terms.

In countries with dictators, there are no elections and political parties are unlikely to exist.  Dictators stay in power indefinitely.

Furthermore, China's democracy is growing as they are growing the number of levels of elections (source).