PS: The fact China is not a democracy which has some unpleasant results: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
Quick, do a good job and renovate everything, hide or move anything annoying or embarrassing while the boss is here is part of Chinese management everywhere from Xi Jinping on down. Supervision and management are hard, especially when your subordinates are constantly shading the truth and covering things up.
My true definition of democracy is direct democracy. Once you start giving power to a representative then you stop being democratic. And that includes power to survive, eat, have shelter, have vacation, have time to study and pursue creative things.
But unless we can instantly communicate like the Protoss can then no, we can't achieve 'rule by the people'. However, it's not simply a choice of Direct Democracy, 3-branch system, 1-party system. We can have system where there is way less concentrated power (again, emphasis on power including many things like education in critical thinking).
Having said that. Yes China is not a democracy. Nor any other country. It is a question of how power (again, my emphasis) is concentrated and the potential of corruption.
The only thing which can reliably be said about modern debate on how to structure a good representative government, is that the participants are rarely informed about the 500 years of debate on the subject that occurred before they were born
They were just some guys drafting a law, get over it. People draft laws all the time.
In theory it has the advantages of direct democracy, without requiring telepathy. Of course, that's not necessarily to say that it would work well, but it's an interesting concept at least.
Funny thing is, people say one party system is not a democracy. What about USA's two party system? Both of them have representatives elected by people (baring the violence).
But in both, people can't realistically get a new party in government, let alone run the country. Yet new parties get elected in other parts of the world, even if they don't run the government as a majority.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_democratic_dictatorsh...
What is democracy in a modern sense?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Party_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Party_System
We're arguably currently on the sixth one.
That said, my above point is about non ruling party representatives. In Europe, there tends to be more than 5 different parties, showing plenty of voter choice is possible.