zlacker

The point remains that they have politics. It's not some lockstep monolith.

As far as which culture has more healthy accountability.. plenty of corruption to go around on all sides, the comparison would be pretty nuanced.

I'd say that China has a lot more low-level corruption, as a bigger % of their economy, what with large swaths of the country being pretty third-world, but also more accountability for senior people who fuck up badly. They executed a baby food exec who poisoned kids, while nobody saw a day in jail for poisoning the city of Flint. Rick Snyder probably has a nice lobbyist job.

Or, look at Covid -- the mayor of Wuhan and governor of Hubei were sacked over their poor initial handling. Is NY gonna elect a Republican over it? TX elect a Democrat? No way in either case. Maybe we have less accountability in some ways specifically due to the 2-party system's polarization. Arguably Trump lost over it, but the guy literally got covid, right before the election, after downplaying it for 6 months and still got the 2nd most votes in history.

>>refene+(OP)
>Or, look at Covid -- the mayor of Wuhan and governor of Hubei were sacked over their poor initial handling. Is NY gonna elect a Republican over it? TX elect a Democrat?

I mean, whoever they replace the mayor of Wuhan and governor of Hubei with will certainly still be members of the Chinese Communist Party. NY and TX might not flip their governing parties, but I'd be much more willing to assure you that the process of choosing their replacements will be more transparent than that for Wuhan and Hubei.

>>Initia+6d1
They won't flip parties and no incumbent is ever at serious risk of a primary challenge. You can call it transparent I guess but it's also a foregone conclusion.

>>refene+kw1
Not sure I like how transparency plays out currently in the US: "well, he's a moron but at least he's not republican/democrat"

>>refene+(OP)
I think it is probably more accurate to say that they have "factionalism," rather than "politics." China has had a one-party system with strikingly low participation (~6% of national population) for the past seven decades.

>>thedai+KZ1
They have politics, but (in the absence of parties) not partisanship in the narrow sense. Elections and parties aren't politics, they are just key mechanisms of politics in liberal democratic states.