but when I point out the cost of China’s flavour of government suddenly the US is a dictatorship?

I mean I linked you a whole bunch of western studies showing that people living in China see their country as being more democratic than people living in US see theirs. Furthermore, a study analyzing decades of US policy has found the following:

That certainly does sound like US is a dictatorship of capital to me where regular working class people have little say in the running of the system.

My argument is based on the empirical evidence available, meanwhile I have no idea what you base your position on.