This means that Chinese people do not get to vote when they elect their leaders. This also means that the government is very powerful and has traditionally dominated people's lives for the last 70 years. When your grandparents were in grade school, the government was so big that only the government was allowed to give people jobs, and there were no companies outside the government. The government also helped to take care of older people, education, trash collection, supporting the arts, and every other aspect of life.
Our country, the United States of America, is very unusual. We are mostly an immigrant country. This means that from the days of Thomas Jefferson to Teddy Roosevelt and even up until now, many people from other countries left their old communities behind to find a new home in the United States in places like Brooklyn. For that reason, charities, churches, and clubs have always been extremely important ways to bring together very different kinds of people in the U.S.A.
China's history is very different because, for the most part, people did not start moving around a lot until much more recently. In the late 1970s, China's government started to open up slowly to the outside world and to let other organizations try to help the poor, the elderly and the sick. It also means that new jobs opened up in the big cities where people could start making good money for the first time in their lives.
In traditional China, people always depended on their neighbors and on their community to get through hard times. If you ran out of food, sometimes your neighbor or your cousin could help you until you got back on your feet.
