I've said this before but the political systems of China and Japan are remarkably similar in all but name. There are some substantial differences, but they're not really the ones people think they are. China is a de jure one party state while Japan is a de facto one party state; both countries have inquisitorial justice systems with 99% conviction rates (if you get arrested, you're getting convicted, whether you did it or not), both countries have to a significant degree dirigiste economies...
As far as I understand it, the main differences come down to:
Japan has freedom of speech and of the press, which is a pretty good thing.
Japan has a lot fewer capital controls and a less regulated financial sector (in particular, a fuller system of financial instruments); China has a highly regulated financial sector, most financial institutions are nationalized, and the available financial instruments are quite limited. Whether this is good or bad is a sticky question.
Japan has done less and less state-directed investment over time, although they still do a lot; China does as much state-directed investment as ever.
China has a ton of SOEs, 25% of China's economy is SOEs, Japan has a few but they're nowhere near as important.
Japan has the keiretsu, which nobody can explain. Horizontally-integrated pseudo-monopolistic conglomerates that form like, a de facto middle layer between the ordinary private sector and the state.
Japan has local democracy.
Japan has gotten significantly less dirigiste and more neoliberal since the 90s; the state-directed investment and state control of industry were highest in the postwar years of Japan's economic boom. How you want to analyze the causality here is up to you.
I would probably live in either country. Local democracy is nice but as an foreign resident you don't get to vote anyway. If it weren't for the freedom of speech thing it would be a total toss-up, but I do like freedom of speech so Japan gets the edge.
My understanding, which is all second hand, is that the Japanese Liberal party has a lot of factions which compete despite being under the same party, to an extent that's supposedly moreso than the same sounding thing in American parties.
More to the point, I don't think you put places where one party is dominant democratically in the same category as one where no one not in the party can even legally run; whatever problems I have with New York politics there is an actual democracy there that there isn't in Shanghai. The LDP has actually lost! Twice!
Not much, and I'm unfamiliar with the equivalent terminology and technique of gerrymandering in the Japanese system that would make "Well they do get elected" a weaker argument. But still, that is in fact an important part: The LDP will actually lose power if they lose public support; the CCP won't. (or rather, they will, but only at a much lower level of public support)
There is definitely a meaningful difference here, it says something that the LDP can and has for brief periods lost power. But also,
1. Institutionally, Japanese politics tends to be rather "personalistic" in a way that American politics is not. Japan has extremely stringent restrictions on campaigning; candidates are only allowed to engage in political activities for a two week campaign period and cannot buy TV or radio time for campaign purposes, they are allocated a small amount of time by the government and that's it (as a humorous result, one of the main ways politicians campaign is via sound trucks, literally driving around in a truck and advertising themselves via loud speaker; these are a staple of campaign season in Japan). Strict campaign restrictions like this in general do a lot to entrench incumbents; Singapore uses this among other tactics to entrench the rule of the PAP. But more importantly, it means that most campaign-type activities in Japan are conducted unofficially, year-round, by local "support groups" that basically consist of a politician's extended network of personal connections working to generate support in sectors of society they're involved in, in exchange for, essentially, favoritism for them or for those sectors, in a way that often ventures into what would be seen as tit-for-tat corruption elsewhere. These networks are personalistic in that they're aligned with individual politicians and not parties, but I gather the LDP's business connections and [other connections] in general mean that LDP politicians are extremely advantaged in this regard. It's even common for Diet seats to pass down generationally, because these support networks are passed down from father to son.
2. The LDP governs, or at least in the past has governed, more like the CCP than like e.g. the US Democrats or Republicans. In particular, at the height of their power in the 20th century, the actual passing of legislation in the Diet was almost perfunctory, with the internal Policy Research Affairs Committee within the LDP essentially deciding what policies were going to be enacted, often with party members who didn't even hold seats in the Diet but sat on the committee playing a deciding role.
Granted, in the mid-2000s the LDP lost a significant amount of their institutional power, and I think Japanese politics is significantly more oppositional now. But historically the "de facto one party state" label was not an exaggeration.
There's an extremely influential book in comparative politics, Democracy and Development by Przeworski et al in 2000, which proposes to define "democracy" according to an "alternation rule": a country is a democracy iff it has had more than one governing party.
Needless to say it's controversial. That extremely simple definition produces a highly overlapping classification with other common definitions, but it includes/excludes some interesting cases. Japan was considered a democracy under this definition because it had experienced an alternation in power: in 1993. Botswana and South Africa both became democracies last year, I think.
Anyhow, there's a lot to this idea that one-party states (whether de facto or de jure) are fundamentally more similar than different, whether or not other common attributes (correlates?) of democracy are present.
















