You can always say that the respective other site is “just” operating on propaganda based opinions.

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make by saying that people in China believe to be living in a democracy. So do the people living in liberal democracies, a system you yourself describe as a dictatorship. All that you’re proving is that people can be mistaken. Not which people - if any - actually are.

Without a clear definition of what one means by “democracy” it’s a pretty useless argument.

If you include freedom of assembly, free speech, a free press, free and secret elections and the other commonly valued parts of a western style democracy there’s really no question that China doesn’t even come close to qualifying.

The people in power in the West love the power the PRC has and do their best eroding the little power people here have to implement similar levels of surveillance and control where they don’t already exist.

I see only losers in this kind of competition.

I get that you’re an advocate of authoritan one party rulership and you’re free to call that democracy.

I’m not exactly a fan of liberal democracy but I value systems where the citizens have a high degree of influence on who governs them, the ability to freely create opposition parties and where state censorship and suppression are not openly advocated.

I’d be really happy if there was a living, successful alternative to the western style liberal democracies. Leninism or the particular capitalist system China has developed don’t seem very attractive to me.

Who gave you the impression that the PRC is a democracy at all?

Maybe. The issue is that it’s not the quantity but the quality of research that matters.

Do you think that the only choices are between Chinese and US state propaganda?

You don’t even need independent research to realize that a parliament that only meets once in a while to verify the work of a much smaller group can’t be the one that’s actually in power.

If you look a bit more into it, you see that the members are replaced in fixed time spans, are all part of the same party, are picked from the top down and so it goes on.

It’s not the organ with the actual power.

Official Chinese sources are unreliable when they spout bullshit like saying the rubberstamping meetup that happens once every blue moon that solely consists of party selected individuals is who holds the power instead of the much smaller group that actually actively controls legislation.

But I guess political science is also exclusively western propaganda so there’s no choice but to believe a choppy power point presentation.

http://www.chinatoday.com/org/cpc/
https://news.cgtn.com/event/2021/who-runs-the-cpc/index.html
https://news.cgtn.com/event/2019/whorunschina/index.html

Do you think those are sources? Pointing at the National Congress or the Central Committee as if those actually held any power is ludicrous.

Because the PRC is not a democracy?