The key feature of democracy is not necessarily having people choose their own rules, but instead enabling peaceful power transitions. Any place where people c

The key feature of democracy is not necessarily having people choose their own rules, but instead enabling peaceful power transitions. Any place where people can still legitimately change the government through democracy is likely to have a reasonable cap on the corruption levels, but that still assumes other functioning parts of society, like an independent judiciary, free press, freedom of speech and association, etc. Most of those things aren't the case in China, so, absent evidence, you'd have to assume China is more corrupt.