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Comment by ohbtvz | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know if it's correct to call China a "dictatorship" but I'll humour you for a moment.

Seriously? What's your definition of "dictatorship"? Let's take Wikipedia's one for example:

> A dictatorship is a form of government which is characterized by a leader or a group of leaders which holds governmental powers with few to no limitations on them.

Can you sincerely say that it doesn't apply?

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This argument about whether Xi is a dictator or not actually plays out with fair regularity on his Talk page[0] on Wikipedia. The general consensus – whether astroturfed by CCP I cannot tell – usually ends that he is not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Xi_Jinping/Archive_1

Wikipedia also deletes articles about female academics who go on to win the Nobel prize the next day. I don't particularly care about the "consensus" that they build.

I lived 30 years of my life in Soviet Union. If I have to choose a single thing which sucks even more than living best years of my life in this country, it's the people from free world discussing whether communism is bad or not so bad, dictatorship or authoritarian, whether the general idea of communism is right or not etc.

China is a lot of things, it's nominally communist but that doesn't quite capture the whole situation on its own, it's technically a "dictatorship" by that definition (probably more so recently with Xi Jinping consolidating power) but that also doesn't quite capture it all either. I don't want to debate terminology because it's tedious and detracts from the actual point I was making - that just because the CCP has a lot of power, doesn't mean they don't believe they need a face-saving way out of zero-Covid.

Guys you're both right.

Well, don't start your comment by nitpicking terminology if you don't want to debate terminology. You can't just drop an argument and then evade contradiction like that.

I made a comment with a very light disagreement, but went along with the China=dictatorship premise anyway and you blew your top, didn’t engage with the original comment.

It’s the way of the internet, people think they smell blood in the water, get all riled up and lose sight of the actual topic

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