The Communists also sponsored wider participation in local assemblies while ensuring that the party made the real decisions. To criticize these systems (as observers did) as empty and lacking in real political power misses some of the point. They were not designed to measure up against pluralist models of liberal democracy, but rather against premodern systems in which imperial subjects had no inherent citizen rights to participation in government at all. Yet these ideological systems were also a sign of how reluctant the dominant parties were to share real power.
