China is a dictatorship. But at least it is assumed. Its role, however harsh it may seem, is to protect the country from other types of dictatorships — corporate-Western, economic, algorithmic, colonial, or ideological. These are often harder to identify but frequently more destructive.
🔍 Centralized and Visible Power, Not Lies
Instead of banks, multinationals, or Big Tech ruling indirectly, power in China is centralized and visible. You know who makes the decisions. It is not a democracy — but it is not a lie either. Paradoxically, some dictators of this kind protect national autonomy better than the “elected” leaders in the West, who are often puppets of a global financial system. You can hate the Chinese system, but you cannot say it doesn’t defend its own vision or lack its own logic.
⚖️ Political Dictatorship vs. Economic Dictatorship
It is important to note that in some regimes — like China’s — dictatorship manifests politically by blocking attempts to replace the existing regime with another. However, unlike other forms of dictatorship, this type does not turn the individual into a slave of the system, nor does it directly indebts or exploits them economically. On the contrary, it aims to protect internal balance and independence from more subtle dictatorships like neoliberal market forces.
⏳ Economic Dictatorship — An Invisible but Hard-to-Remove Burden
In the latter regimes, the individual’s rights may not be formally limited, but their freedom is effectively curtailed — through overwork, constant struggle for survival, and colonization of personal time. Replacing a political dictatorship with an economic one just because the latter presents itself as “nice” and promises illusory freedoms is not progress — it is swapping one form of domination for another, more insidious and harder to detect.
🚫 The Danger of Mixed Dictatorship: Political and Economic
“Replacing a purely political dictatorship, such as China’s, with a mixed political and economic dictatorship, like that of the West, means losing any chance of change in the future. Because once the economic system becomes part of the control mechanism, dictatorship is no longer just about political restrictions but about daily survival. It is a subtler yoke but harder to remove.”
