This is not unique to China by any means, and it's one of the reasons I stop reading comments where "the U.S." (drones, genocide, just as bad, etc,.) isn't followed by "government".
The U.S. is different, though, because our government was created by the people, and we claim that its powers were delegated to it by us. In the U.S., the buck ultimately stops with us, the citizens.
China claims the same: it's a People's Republic, after all. Sure, there's a difference between a notionally meritocratic single-party system and a notionally democratic two-party system, but it's not quite as large as the average US history textbook would have you believe.
