[gruez]

>Are we describing China or Brexit/Trump polls from 2016.

Snark aside, there's a huge difference between the two. In the case of brexit/trump, even if there was social pressure to not reveal your real preferences to the pollsters, everyone's real preferences are accurately represented at the polls. Moreover, nobody is risking getting sent to reeducation camps or getting their social credit scores ruined by saying they support trump or brexit. This is as opposed to China where the only measure you have are opinion polls, and the only cross-check mechanism is whether the CCP is still in power or not.

[100011]

It wasn't a snark; I have yet to witness a liberal definition of totalitarian state that's not a sand castle. A liberal state is a schizo state that has no positive theory of state so it doesn't have a theory of totalitarian state. It's delusions about how oppressive monarchy was, slightly before they started bloodshedding in the name of raison raisonnante, do not apply here.

What the Chinese have is a formal system, and I can't quite tell if the informal liberal system isn't worse. This was a point of contemplation for Andrei Navrozov as an emigrant from USSR to US in the 1970s in his book "The Gingerbread Race" [1]

> [1] https://archive.org/details/NavrozovAndreiTheGingerbreadRace...