In the US, you are expected to uphold the line that brings you donors. That makes leftist parties non-viable. That’s not such a big difference from the Chinese situation as you’d think, except in direction.
People online vastly overestimate the actual effect of money on political results, naturally disregarding all the donations made to candidates that lose and ignoring races where the lesser funded candidates win.
If Americans wanted a leftist government, they’d vote for it, simple as that. And yet even in the most left leaning states and cities in the nation , leftist principles have failed to gain much electoral ground.
-- Put a million Uighurs in camps
-- Persecutes followers of pretty much all religions --- Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Falun Gong, etc
-- Flat-out censors anything that offends them in the slightest
-- Puts whoever they want into detention with no kind of due process, from small-time activists to billionaires
-- Harvests the organs of (not previously dead) prisoners
-- Had drones peering into apartment windows during the latest COVID lockdown, broadcasting the literal message "control your soul's desire for freedom"
-- and of course is an autocracy in which Xi Jinping has absolute power
The USA is far from perfect but one thing we learned from Trump in 2016 and Bloomberg in 2020 is that money isn't everything in American politics. The parties do have major differences and bad actors can be held accountable.
I'm not American, but this equivalence that some people like to draw between the governments of China and the USA drives me crazy.
(Though viewing China as a full autocracy with absolute power of a single individual is extremely simplistic)
> (Though viewing China as a full autocracy with absolute power of a single individual is extremely simplistic)
It's overly simplistic, but less "overly" than it was 10 years ago.