How each model solves the same problems
Instead of “democracy versus anarchism”, compare the concrete ways collective problems get solved.
| Question | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| How are decisions made? | CCP Politburo and Standing Committee under Chairman Mao; party committees shadowing every state body; the National People's Congress ratified decisions. Mao repeatedly bypassed formal bodies. | Collective leadership in the Politburo Standing Committee; party control of personnel through the Organization Department; local governments ran economies and piloted policies under central veto.Term limits and rotation of office | A stratified random sample of 523 voters deliberated in moderated groups and plenaries and answered questionnaires before and after; no decisions were taken.Sortition / citizens' assembly | |
| How are conflicts resolved? | Party discipline, public security organs, labour camps and mass 'struggle' meetings; no independent courts. Disputes within the leadership ended in purges. | Party discipline commissions, courts under party leadership, petition offices; mass protest met with repression, most lethally in June 1989. | Balanced briefing materials, trained neutral moderators and competing experts structured disagreement. | |
| How are public goods funded? | Central planning and collective farms; urban work units supplied housing, rations and services; rural basic health care and schooling expanded. | Fiscal decentralisation with local land revenues; infrastructure and education expanded rapidly; health and pension coverage rebuilt in the 2000s. | Privately funded; produced published results, media coverage and a peer-reviewed study. | |
| How is AI used? | None; a pre-digital planned economy. | None at system level; digital government grew late in the period. | No AI role. | |
| What are the main risks? | Unchecked personal power, falsified statistics, campaign quotas, no exit from collectives, and suppression of dissent turning policy errors into mass death. | Corruption, local debt and land seizures driven by growth targets, environmental damage, factionalism, and rules on succession without independent enforcement.CLM-1089CLM-1091 | Self-selection into attendance; artificial setting; analysis by the method's designers; no institutional uptake. |
This illustrates differences in design; it is not a universal claim about outcomes. Each cell links to mechanisms and the claims behind them.