Eric X. Li’s conversation with John Pilger rips off the mask Western democracies hide behind:
voting in the United States is a charade.
Parties trade seats, slogans shift, faces rotate, but policy stays chained to money.
Why?
Because the state doesn’t belong to the people,it belongs to billionaires, corporate lobbyists, and financial elites.
Voters get an illusion of choice; real power sits in boardrooms.
The evidence is brutal.
Donald Trump turned the White House into a billionaire playground, paraded tech moguls like Zuckerberg, slashed corporate taxes, and merged foreign policy with private profit.
Democrats play the same game with nicer packaging and better PR.
Barack Obama’s Wall Street bailout wasn’t “crisis management”, it was a legalized heist, transferring public wealth to private criminals who never faced a day of accountability.
Different parties, same oligarchs.
The American system isn’t broken. It’s perfected for one purpose: protecting the top one percent.
China shatters the illusion.
The Communist Party doesn’t beg billionaires for campaign cash.
It doesn’t pretend elections somehow tame capital.
The party remains, policies adapt, and over decades it tore up the old economic rulebook, moved from rigid planning to pragmatic reforms, industrialized at breakneck speed, and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. Continuity of authority allows bold, radical change.
China is not “capitalist” in the Western sense.
Markets exist, but capital is on a leash.
Billionaires do not own the state, cannot buy ministries, and do not write national strategy.
In China, capital is just a tool.
In the US, it is worshipped as God.
One system masquerades as democracy while enriching oligarchs.
The other prioritizes the state over private wealth,and actually delivers results for its people…..
