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.

https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democracy-most-us-say-america-isnt-1711176

If you even actually read the title of the article I had linked, you would see that by a survey at the same time most Americans described America as not being democratic.

As an aside, I wasn't using "dictatorship" in the way neoliberals do. In Marxism, it's a term used to describe who the ruling class is, so a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" is a society in which the ruling class is the bourgeoisie. A "dictatorship of the proletariat" is a society in which the proletariat (people who subsist by selling their labor) are the ruling class.

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.

Nonsense, there are plenty of protests in China, hundreds every year. There are also free, secret elections, it just follows a different structure from the style the US uses. Can you produce any credible evidence for people being punished for voting a certain way, or their vote being published in some inappropriate manner? Or do you have vibes and RFA editorials?

Free Press in the west is overwhelmingly the freedom of the rich to control the media and thereby what is published. These people also own the politicians, so to say this isn't government censorship is silly pedantry.

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.

Who says shit like that except maybe Trump? Can you identify politicians who do vs ones who demonize the PRC with bullshit charges?

As an aside, the idea of the PRC having more surveillance than the US or UK is comical. They have far better digital privacy protection laws and a lower number of CCTV cameras per capita than either country.

I think you don't realize that when the rich persistently saturate the media with bullshit ideas about countries like the PRC, it's only natural that people with no personal experience with the country typically will just go along with it over time because that's what allows them to parse information and operate in their environment with a lower level of conflict and cognitive dissonance.

Isn't it just so much more comfortable to believe that the western press was credible? Sure, they tended to either mandate or at least platform cheer leading for the invasion of an endless number of countries over false pretenses like WMDs or false flag attacks (second Gulf of Tonkin incident) or other atrocity propaganda, which of course is also championed in Congress. If you ask some reddit-ass user on Lemmy who has the better record for honesty between PRC media and US media, they will tell you without hesitation that it is US media even as they "disavow" the US, but they are still fundamentally operating based on vibes that come from western corporate media and for all their "disavowal", parroting exactly the stories the US State Department says about its enemies both directly and through its mouthpieces in the media.