Late Stage Capitalism

I have given sources on the structure of the democratic makeup of China, and your counters are "it isn't because I said it isn't." You can read pretty easily about how China is structured and why, or why it is democratic in the first place.

Further, you outright ignored the key findings from my linked survey:

While the CCP is seemingly under no imminent threat of popular upheaval, it cannot take the support of its people for granted. Although state censorship and propaganda are widespread, our survey reveals that citizen perceptions of governmental performance respond most to real, measurable changes in individuals’ material well-being. For government leaders, this is a double-edged sword, as citizens who have grown accustomed to increases in living standards will expect such improvements to continue, and citizens who praise government officials for effective policies may indeed blame them when such policy failures affect them or their family members directly. While our survey reinforces narratives of CCP resilience, our data also point to specific areas in which citizen satisfaction could decline in today’s era of slowing economic growth and continued environmental degradation.

Your argument, essentially, is that 1.4 billion people are simply brainwashed into acceptance, which is just chauvanism. On the contrary, studies and analysis directly show that Chinese citizens approve of their system because it has dramatically improved their material conditions. Yet, you say I am the one drinking the Kool-Aid for having done the effort of reading the studies?

Forgive me for trusting the data and statistics freely available, and the conclusions of those who took them, over anecdotes from a (presumably) Canadian trained in standard Western Economics.