Not 100% sure you know what that means.

I didn't know that this was going to end up being one of my top comments or I probably would have chosen a different way to say that (or just removed the knock on China's police force entirely; it was a bad joke that fell flat). With that said, though, I do definitely know what a totalitarian dictatorship is and yes, China is one. It's a type of government in an old (and frankly not that great) political theory where the state is nondemocratic, not a monarchy, and has a ruling political philosophy that requires intervention in aspects of life outside of the political.

Obviously that encapsulates a lot of very different types of government, which is why that theory isn't so great. It's also hard to apply it to states like North Korea, because the governing philosophy of the state puts the leader on a pedestal, and it's almost entirely under their control. In a more modern framework, North Korea might actually be considered a sultanate, where the leader of the state doesn't distinguish between the state, its citizenry, and their private property, and where any ruling philosophy is just a pretext that can be altered at will (although that depends both on the internal workings of the North Korean government and on the validity of the sultanate as a concept, which is complicated in a way that I'm not about to get into in this comment). China is sometimes now considered an example of a consultative totalitarian state, where some strictly delineated free political speech is allowed to assist bureaucrats and government officials in making their decisions. Iran would probably be another example of that type of government.