This article in the Global Times quotes Jiang Jinquan, director of the Policy Research Office of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, discussing the question of democracy at a press conference on the sixth plenary session of the 19th Central Committee of the CPC. He observed the weaknesses and limitations of Western capitalist democracy and noted the hypocrisy of attempting to impose this model on other countries via colour revolutions. Jiang Jinquan affirmed that China will continue to develop its own whole-process people’s democracy rather than attempting to copy the Western model.
The US’ democracy summit convened next month with the attempt to “revive” Western democracy amid mounting democratic problems in their countries is a huge irony, as its purpose is simply to suppress other countries and divide the world into different camps, a senior Chinese official said on Friday.
Jiang Jinquan,director of the Policy Research Office of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, made the remarks at Friday’s press conference on the sixth plenary session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
He said democracy is not a patent of the West, nor can it be defined by the West. Western democracy is a democracy dominated by capital, a democracy of the rich, not true democracy.
Some Western countries have shown a hollowing out of democracy,triggering dissatisfaction among their fellow people, but they are still trying to impose their democratic model on other countries. Color revolutions in recent years have resulted in disasters to local people, which the people of the world have become increasingly aware of, Jiang said in response to a question on comparison between China’s whole-process people’s democracy and Western democracy.
Jiang listed several polls as an example. According to a new survey from the Pew Research Centre, 57 percent of global respondents and 72 percent of Americans said that US democracy used to be a good example but has not been recently.
According to an NPR poll, 81 percent of US adults say the future of US democracy is under threat.
In contrast, two recent polls released by a US polling agency show that Chinese people’s satisfaction with the CPC and the Chinese government is 95 percent and 98 percent, respectively.
Democracy is not for decoration, but for solving people’s problems. Whether a country is democratic or not depends on whether its people are the masters of the country, whether its people have the right to vote and more importantly, whether they have the right to participate widely. It depends on what promises are made during the election process, but more importantly, it depends on how many of these promises are fulfilled after an election, Jiang said.
“Democracy is not true if the people are awakened only at the time of voting and then fall into hibernation, if they can only listen to the election slogans but have no say after the election, if they are favored only at the time of campaigning and then are left out after the election,” Jiang said.
Jiang said the CPC has realized that China’s political civilization and political system must be deeply rooted in the mind of Chinese society. Copying other countries’ political systems will not work and may even destroy the country’s future.
Since the 18th CPC National Congress, the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core has adhered to the path of political development under socialism with Chinese characteristics and upheld the leadership of the Party and the position of the people as masters of the country, has resolutely resisted the erosion and influence of the Western political trend of so-called “constitutionalism”, ruling party rotation, and developed a democratic road of whole-process people’s democracy, Jiang said.
The Chinese people have a high degree of confidence in their political system, and the fundamental reason lies in the fact that whole-process people’s democracy is highly democratic, fully fledged and deeply welcomed by the Chinese people. This is true people’s democracy, Jiang said.
When you have a leadership that does not care for the people you will have poverty and homelessness two things you won’t find in China.
I am from Vancouver,Canada and i wanted to say that Capitalism was never for the majority of people.When Capitalism was just beginning money for machinery that was needed to get Capitalism going was got from wealthy people at that time. Over hundreds of years the owners of capitalist factories became very rich and owned lots of property and land.The money stayed with the Capitalists, only small amounts of money went to the working people.This type of Government was called Capitalism because the money needed by the Capitalists came from people who had Capital (Money).The working class had no say in this.To this day the working class don’t have a say in their workplaces. Only a Revolution will change that not Voting.It was Revolutions that changed society throughout the history of Humanity.Like Rosa Luxemburg said:We needs Change not Reforms.China has made its Change.the western countries like the USA, Canada and the EU are still in the Reform stage.
A few points about this piece.
1. The main political point at the end does not not itself require (to be linked) this point of theoretical political economy. Where sococialists stand on US imperialist agression against China – the question of aggressor imperialist nations – was settled in Lenin’s Rights of Nations..”
2. From a point of view of theoretical political economy the article ends where it should in fact begins. Its a matter of fact that markets predate the capitalist mode of poroduct (mop). It is also true that the the mop determines th role & structure markets play in the mop – an instrument of allocating labuour of society efficiently between different human occupations, or an instrument for appropriating surplus value? An argument about markets cannot be complete unless it settles the question of the underlying mop.
3. The question is: in what way is the mode of accumulation in China particularly socialist & not capitalist?
I’m happy to see that there is direct pushback against this Western monopolization of the concept of ‘democracy’. Insofar as it is accepted by nearly all modern States that sovereignty derives from ‘the people’ every regime has sought to legitimize itself as ‘democratic’. This has resulted in the West branding, as part of a propaganda effort to delegitimize its opponents, its rivals as “authoritarian” and “anti-democratic”. Notably, without ever elaborating what exactly this means.
This lack of elaboration is especially interesting insofar as there are significant institutional differences within so-called “Western liberal democracies” that are constantly glossed over. Not to mention, the West’s deployment of ‘democracy’ and ‘authoritarianism’ are clearly not sincere insofar as the West has no problem allying with clearly undemocratic countries (I’m looking at you, Saudi Arabia); rather it is an attempt to delegitimize their ideological or geopolitical (often socialist) rivals in the eyes of the Western population so as to justify aggressive action against said rivals.
That said, I do think that there is an interesting institutional difference between Western political systems and other political systems, and it doesn’t come down to ‘democracy’ per se, but rather how politics is conceptualized and structures.
What the West calls “democracy” doesn’t have to do with rule of the people per se, since this can be attained through numerous institutional forms, in which elections (if we go back to Aristotle) aren’t considered a defining feature of democracy. It isn’t elections that are at issue, but rather ‘competition’. The ‘competitive elections’ component of Western political systems renders politics into a game between various factions/players: the political parties. What the West calls democracy is the fact that whether these political parties ‘win’ the political game is determined (at least in part) by their performance in electoral playoffs.
In contrast to this game approach, China (among other socialist countries) doesn’t see politics or democracy as competitive, but cooperative. The point isn’t to “win power” and then to prepare for the next playoffs by using said power to make the game more favorable to you (this is endemic in the US political system with, among other things, gerrymandering and attempts at disenfranchising voters), but rather to gather together representatives of various elements of society for the purposes of managing the commonwealth. We can see this element at play especially in China’s idea of consultative democracy, and the fact that the Chinese legislatures are drawn from a much wider segment of society than their Western counterparts (we need only examine the composition of the various legislative bodies between socialist countries and capitalist countries to see that socialist countries have a much more statistically representative sample of the population among the legislatures; so if we want to know ‘who rules?’ we can examine the demographics of who is a legislature, i.e., who is responsible for making laws?).
Perhaps I’m mistaken in thinking that nobody has yet identified this conceptual and institutional difference between the two system of politics, but it is clearly one that I don’t see emphasized enough.