In China, they still of course describe it in broad strokes as political power belonging to the people. But when one presses deeper into it, it becomes apparent that unlike in Western liberal democracies where people can exercise that power through elections, Chinese people can't. So they instead say things like, "Well, we have people's democracy here, it works differently".

Here's a video I found which was on top of the Baidu Baike (百度百科) article on 民主: https://baike.baidu.com/video?collectionId=0&from=lemma&fromIndex=0&fromModule=lemma_top&fromPage=lemmaTop&isSensitive=0&lemmaId=291141&nid=15108339075742377209

It discusses the differences between Western electoral democracy and Chinese democracy, and the perceived shortcomings of the former.

I found his explanation of democracy in China to be reflective of fairly typical views of how people think China is a democratic country. And he uses the term 人民民主 ("people's democracy", to any non-Chinese reading this) to describe it. His examples are a farmer suggesting a welfare policy that is adopted by the Party and a food delivery driver calling the 12345 complaint hotline to get signposts replaced. To a Western viewer these are nonsensical examples of democracy; they're basic examples of the government responding to people's demands for public services. But apparently because Chinese democracy works this way, that makes it the "most effective, most genuine, most functional" form of "socialist democracy".

Chinese people know what Westerners call democracy. And they know it's not exactly the same as what they call "民主". But they don't have a word for it. Just like English doesn't really have a word to describe what Chinese people call "民主". I think it's unfair to translate that term as "democracy", as someone who speaks both Standard Mandarin Chinese and English, though neither are technically my native tongue.

If I were to coin a new term to describe it, the best I could do is "benevolent government". But then people just accuse me of Orientalism.

And I do mean it when I say that Chinese people truly believe (whether that is a product of propaganda or not is a topic of a different discussion) that their system is superior to Western liberal democracy. For what it's worth, I don't agree. Living in a country that practices Western democracy doesn't prevent people from voting in a government that does what they want, as the Communist Party reportedly does. But it does give you a choice in the event that it goes sour. And the Chinese people, as it currently stands, are kind of just relying on the Party to keep doing things that are good and popular. That's not guaranteed to always be the case, and they can't really do anything about it if it stops being that way.

民主 comes from Classical Chinese, where it originally meant "ruler" (of a people). It was repurposed I believe in the late Qing or early republican era to mean "democracy".

民 means "people", i.e. the population, the public. 主 means "host", "owner", or "master". So while 民主 originally combined those to mean one who was the master of the people, it now is interpreted to mean the state of affairs where the people are the masters.

There is a related term, 民權, "popular sovereignty", and also sometimes is translated to "democracy", but it has a subtly different meaning than 民主. It comes from 民 ("people", as before) and 權 ("power", "right", "authority"). Wiktionary doesn't have the etymology, but I'm guessing it's possibly a calque of Ancient Greek δημοκρατία (δῆμος, "people" + κράτος, "power"), possibly through one of the many European language words for democracy which derive from that, done during the late Imperial era, which is when many modern Chinese political terms were coined.

Well, that's some blatant racism. Fascinating that Lemmy is a refuge for that. Political opponents of China, clean up your yard!