[bane]

The Chinese government is highly structured and in general features most of the things one might expect in a modern nation-state (an executive, a legislature, a court system, etc.)

The exception, and what makes it hard to understand for outsiders, is that one of the political parties (Chinese Communist Party) is also an extra, supervisory, branch of government and sits on-top of and permeates all the regular bureaucratic structures. There are other political parties but since they cannot surmount the CCP in this structure they remain relegated to very minor roles. The military (PLA) is also a branch of government, but is also an element of the CCP. One way of thinking of it is that the government of China is not allowed to have a military, and the ruling political party's own security forces have assumed that role -- with subbranches of that force filling in for traditional military branches such as a Navy and an Air Force - which are all separate "forces" under the Army.

Within the CCP there are factions, or different wings, and the kinds of fairly expected politics in any such organization play out as people jostle for position within the party. These factions can have a number of quite profound disagreements, and may sound more like different parties in some ways, but are united by common core beliefs and history.

This structure creates as many problems as it solves, with no external checks to the current CCP policies - but there are internal processes and checks that are supposed to help maintain legitimacy of the party in this structure. On the flip side, establishing such a system also makes it easier to consolidate power over the major power structures. The current head of China, Xi Jinping, is the head of the party, the head of the executive branch and the head of the military, giving him no real outside checks on authority as he has both the supervisory power and the military power to overwhelm opposition - the presidency is more or a ceremonial role within the government at this point.

However, there are analogues, the U.S. President, for example, is also the head of their respective party, the head of the executive branch, and the head of the military. The difference is that there are built in exit ramps and external checks on power (other parties, other branches of government) that are designed to frustrate the accumulation of power and political parties hold no official and a subservient role to the government apparatus. The military in addition, is not a branch of government whereas it is in the Chinese system.

[kqr]

Since you did not mention it specifically, I'll mention that term limits are suspected to be an important part of keeping a reasonable concentration of power and not having a democracy devolve into a dictatorship.

On the one hand, term limits are deliberately eroded by long-running despots (primarily in some African countries so far, and increasingly elsewhere in the world lately.) On the other hand, Germany's chansellorship does not, IIRC, have term limits and that seems to work fine for them. So maybe being able to remove term limits is a symptom more than a cause?

Either way, questions like these are discussed in the book How Democracies Die, which has been recommended to me and is on my re-read list, but which I haven't gotten to yet.

[wuschel]

> On the other hand, Germany's chansellorship does not [...] habe term limits

In fact, there is a limit: A German citizen might hold the office of Chancellor ("Kanzler", or "Kanzlerin" for female form) four times, or sixteen years in total.

[tharkun__]

And 4 times 4 is quite long actually. That is 16 long years and the current chancellor, Angela Merkel, is actually the 'brain child' of previous 16 year chancellor Helmut Kohl, with just a brief intermittence of Gerhard Schroder in between. For non-observers of the German political parties, Kohl and Merkel are from the 'regular' conservative party (CDU), while Schroder was from the SPD, the regular left or 'working people's party'. Of course after being chancellor he became an advisor for Russian Gazprom... A lot of Germany heats with (Russian) natural gas.

https://www.trtworld.com/europe/merkel-helmut-kohl-s-little-...

Kohl: 1 October 1982 - 27 October 1998

Schroder: 27 October 1998 - 22 November 2005

Merkel: 22 November 2005 - whenever Corona ends I suppose. Thuringia already postponed their state elections from April to September because of Corona.

[TheCoelacanth]

I suspect that term limits are less important with a parliamentary system since the head is typically somewhat less powerful than a president.

[kqr]

Contributing factors also include, I suspect, more independence for individual subdivisions, e.g. states in the US or Bundesländer in Germany unless I'm mistaken.

[starfallg]

>One way of thinking of it is that the government of China is not allowed to have a military, and the ruling political party's own security forces have assumed that role -- with subbranches of that force filling in for traditional military branches such as a Navy and an Air Force - which are all separate "forces" under the Army.

This is very similar in concept to the SA/SS (Nazi Germany) or the Red Army (USSR). All were paramilitary wings of political parties before their rise to power.

[xiphias2]

Most of what you described is generally true for autrocracies. The real interesting part of China is that usually autrocracies perform poorly as the leaders put power in front of technological advancement.

Chinese leaders though try really hard to allow tech advancements to happen, and perform quite well on the market.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> with subbranches of that force filling in for traditional military branches such as a Navy and an Air Force - which are all separate "forces" under the Army.

The Chinese Navy is called "People's Liberation Army Navy"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Liberation_Army_Navy

[dotancohen]

  > One way of thinking of it is that the government of China is
  > not allowed to have a military, and the ruling political
  > party's own security forces have assumed that role

Not dissimilar to the Lebanese situation in practice, then?

[takinola]

How did this evolve? I can't think of too many places where a party, rather than an individual, is elevated over the state.

[ConcreteGidget]

I think this is more the rule than the exception. The idea that states exist to serve the individual would be laughed at for most of human history. Be it God or the state, man exists to serve. Conscripting and killing young men for the sake of the state/God/glory has been one of humanities favorite pastimes.

[emptysongglass]

Where did you get this knowledge? I suspect from books and if so I'd like to know which ones, please.

[bane]

I've always been kind of interested in why autocratic regimes or dictators engage in seemingly unnecessary benevolent or constructive activities. At some point I decided to better understand how the Chinese government functions since for a long time it's been both autocratic and surprisingly benevolent in certain areas. So basically some combination of youtube, wikipedia and a few other places till I more or less came to a high-level understanding.

There are also some English language Chinese government produced youtube videos that also do a pretty good job at giving basic civics lessons on how their government works if you can look past all the self-congratulations. It's definitely "complicated" and is not just Xi Jinping barking his every desire and whim as it tends to get reduced to.

For example: https://youtu.be/Qu4QTxl9GVw

There are plenty of others like: https://youtu.be/fgor9fmA6po