> It functions like a dictatorship functions. The dictatorship of the party.

This is exactly the kind of reductive thinking that is getting the West into trouble.

There is no dictatorship system. At most, it points to a non-democratic system. But that term covers an incredibly wide variety of regimes, from 1920s Portugal to Latin American Cold War authoritarian regimes to the USSR to Maoist China to contemporary China, and all of them are very different creatures. The differences between these are much wider than the differences between democratic systems (e.g. US vs Israel vs India), which are already very wide.