Teaching about the "People's" Republic

[Matthew Hurwitz]

I was also shocked at how few people in China are members of the Communist Party, and it made me question how China is able to call itself the "People's" Republic, and consider itself a Communist country when the "People's" party that is in charge comprises only 7% of the population. This feels like to me one of the central tensions in the way that China, and people who talk about China have faced since the integration of China into the global Capitalist market in the 1990s. When students ask what kind of country China is, what do we say? When students ask if China is Communist, what do we say? Do we tell them what the Chinese government would say? Do we tell them what people in China would say? What people in Hong Kong would say? Do we go by the definition of Communist in the dictionary? It's all very confusing, which makes it both really interesting as a case study of how Communism and Capitalism, Dictatorship and Democracy can be merged (either successfully or unsuccessfully depending on who you ask). But it also makes it difficult to teach in a clear way in the couple of days or week that teachers are able to spend teaching modern China in their classes.  I think that in my more advanced classes (AP), I could pose the question of "Is modern China Communist?" or "Is it possible to merge dictatorship and democracy together?" using evidence from their notes on China to back up their argument, but I wonder if there is a strategy or way of conveying the complexities of modern China to a sheltered class or a class with students at all different levels, in a couple days, in a way that avoids the easy labels and definitions but is still easy to understand. Or is that just wishful thinking?