Do the Chinese people get to vote for their leaders at all? Is pressure building for full democracy?
352947
Yes Chinese people can vote for city officials.  In Hong Kong they will be able to vote for their governal leaders in the year 2008 with a plan for the whole country to vote in 2010.\nThe pressure is not building as they don't really care about democracy.  Voting and democracy will not solve anything and is a myth set up by USA to declare it's spreading freedom so they can go to war to get oil.\nChina will have democracy, but it will not change anything.
236316
It's more. You have a _responsibility_ to vote. Voting is the orgasm of democracy. Unfortunately, most citizens can't get it up.
578543
PRevious answer was sort of right.\n\nThe Chinese government is still Communist- in Tiannamen Square many students had gathered to protest the Chinese government.  The government sent in troops and tanks to dispell the protesters, and when they refused to leave- used force against them.
479962
There is no problem with compulsory voting in a democracy. A democracy is not a state of unmitigated freedom. There have to be social rules and laws for any form of government. Without compulsory voting, you get the mess we have in the USA, where one party has deliberately set out to take power away permanently from the other party. Unfortunately for them, they chose a stooge for a leader and it's all about to fall apart.
969464
elections are important b/c without elections, there's no democracy. and to see what life is like without democracy, move to China and try to have more than two kids, then try to criticize the government. \n\nwhenever you find out there's an election going on in your area, find out what issues you care about and research the hell out of them. then find out what the candidates stand for on all the issues, zeroing in on your important ones. if you don't like either of the candidates, write one in who you would vote for. it takes work to be an informed voter. otherwise you'll be just like everyone else and not give a shit what's going on.
158825
In terms of practical differences you can notice today, Chinese have always had top-down governments with no democracy. In China or Taiwan, if it's unclear whether you are allowed to do something or not, the assumption is, you are NOT allowed. In the US, the rule is, you are allowed to do anything, UNLESS there is a law against it.\n\nAnother result of legalism is that in China and Taiwan, the government typically makes almost everything against the law, then doesn't enforce it all.  This means that they can allow a lot of technically illegal behavior, often with  appropriate bribes, but they can always crack down and start enforcing the law as it's written if the wind changes.
1025390
I honestly believe that democracy does not work in all parts of the world. China would fail if democracy ever happened there. China is a country that has deep traditions, and for that reason China will never be a democracy. On top of that they saw what democracy did for Russia.
528232
Its true.  Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft all support Communist China.  You would think that Businesses that have prospered becuase of the nation they were founded, and the freedoms they had in developing they're services, would at least not support communistic ideals but you can tell from all the news stories over the past month or two that, they all do in fact agree, support and abide by the Communist Ideology in China, all for Money.\n\nCapitalism at its best!\n\nWouldn't it be funny if Yahoo deleted this question?  LOL
659430
Not any more.\nThe government is still behined most things but in Beijing, Shanghai and Gunzhou there are many businessmen who now own their own businesses. I work with many of them every day.
256765
Like it or not, they are empowered to do a job by the laws in place in that jurisdiction. The laws were voted on by the community. \n\nThat's the way it works in a democracy.
196160
Yes, it is.  (It's also a republic, capitalist, etc.)  It's not a "direct" democracy in the sense of submitting everything to a direct vote of the people, but the people do have ultimate power.  As a practical matter, the people frequently don't exercise the power they have -- they often don't bother voting, or don't educate themselves on issues -- but the power is there if they choose.
776202
I don't think so.  If people don't want to vote, why make them?  Will it mean anything if they just pick random people because they don't want to be there?
447963
What is their choice really?  Either they do what China tells them or they offer nothing to the people there.  There is no way for them to improve conditions for the people of China if the government blocks and removes them?  Better to sacrafice and be seen then not sacrafice and be eliminated.  \n\nPeople think there is censorship and a lack of privacy here; have no idea what freedoms they enjoy compared to the people of China.
485047
found this some time ago, think may have what you need...\n\n\n\n\nThe last Chinese emperor abdicated in 1912. China fell into utter chaos until, in 1926, Chiang marched an army northward and achieved a semblance of national unification. From 1928 China was under Chiang's dictatorship, with Nanking as the capital. However, Japan seized Manchuria in 1931. Four years later, Chiang's grand effort to stamp out the Chinese Communist party failed when Mao Tse-tung took his followers on the Long March to a remote region. In 1937 the Japanese invaded metropolitan China in force and a general war commenced, with the U.S. joining in on China's side after Pearl Harbor. Chiang and Mao maintained a wary alliance until Japan's defeat. Then there was civil war. The Communists won, establishing the People's Republic in 1949. Chiang fled to Taiwan, where he maintained an authoritarian dictatorship until his death in 1975. \n\nThe conventional wisdom, naturally much encouraged by the Communists and their Western shills, is that Chiang lost China because he was inflexibly incompetent, cared nothing for the common people, and alienated his U.S. ally by permitting his wife's family to loot the country for their own enrichment. One of the things one hopes to learn from a book about Chiang is the degree to which this conventional wisdom is correct. Jonathan Fenby's new biography leaves one believing that it is, with some minor qualifications. To borrow a rhetorical figure from Orwell: Some things are true even though the Chinese Communist party says they are true.\n\nIn fact, once civil-war passions had cooled, the Communists adopted a more generous line towards Chiang. When he died in 1975, they offered to make a suitable burial plot available for him in his home district. (The offer was refused.) The traditional attitude of the Chinese to failed political enterprises is: "If you win, you're the Emperor; if you lose, you're a bandit." This at least has a certain moral neutrality about it, and leaves scope for magnanimity, so long as the failed enterprise can be shown to have had some patriotic color. Chiang's undoubtedly did. Fenby shows us that Chiang was, from his earliest years, motivated mainly by patriotism, though it was a patriotism refracted through his own narrow mind and stunted, unattractive personality. \n\nYet Chiang's greatest enemy was neither Japan nor Mao, but China herself. It requires an effort of imagination for an American of today to grasp the sheer backwardness of China in the period Fenby is writing about, the first half of the 20th century. China was, to be sure, a great civilization, with a glittering literary tradition stretching back continuously to the Bronze Age, respectable accomplishments in pre-industrial science and technology, and a great body of religious and philosophical writing. In matters social, political, and economic, however, China was medieval. Reading Fenby's book, time and again one feels oneself to be not in the modern world at all, but in the Scotland of Macbeth, the Germany of Otto the Great, or the England of the early Plantagenets. Listen:\n\nThough the small, delicate, ruthless governor [of Yunnan Province] had rallied to the Kuomintang cause in name, his revenues from opium and slave-labor tin mines made him anything but a model ally for the national revolution. . . . He had invited a rebellious general with whom he had reached a peace agreement to a luncheon banquet in a tent. At the end of the meal, a swordsman behind the guest chopped off his head, which was then hung from a telegraph pole at the entry to the capital . . .\n\nIt did not help that Chiang himself was distinctly a product of that very backwardness. His governing style was imperial-Confucian: "Tremble and obey!" He could not be bothered much with consultation, and resented disagreement. By Fenby's account, he was not such a military duffer as I had previously
1140971
there is the democratic republic - which the USA has.  They elect people to legislate on their behalf - and elect the leader as well.\n\nThere is the democratic monarchy - which the UK and others have.  It still elects those to legislate for them - but the leader is there by birthright (there are still a couple where the monarch is not just a figure head).\n\nThere is plain democracy, which does not exist to my knowledge anymore, it was in ancient Greece, where there was no real "leader" and that while there was a senate to deal with certain issues, one person = one vote on main issues.\n\nI suppose you could also include the democratic dictatorship where there is "an election" every so many years and surprisingly the "leader" keeps getting re-elected. basically one person = no vote.\n\nThere was the attempt at democratic socialism, but am not sure as much about that.
375889
voting is one of the most important rights that we are granted as a society!  Do you realize the millions of people who fought for our rights to vote, only to have those rights squandered by a country full of lazy and uninterested people?  Women, Blacks... fought for hundreds of years for the right to vote!  I vote because it is my constitutional right to express my opinion, and I vote because in some part my vote influences the country.  What if everyone sat around and decided their vote didnt count?  The country would be totally decided by the politicians... thats called Communism!  \n\nAlso ponder this... if you didnt vote for the presidential race... do you really have a right to complain about anything that he does?  You had an opportunity to cast a vote against him, if you would have, then maybe he would not have entered office.  I believe if you dont vote, your forfeit your right to complain about anything!
1142964
No, I could not tolerate living under a Communist dictatorship.  I appreciate that it has modernized somewhat, but it's still communism.  And as to the Chinese culture, I wonder how much of it is left after the Maoist "cultural revolution."  \n\nEven if I thought I could learn the language (and I don't), I could not live there.