Me-too: China claims it-has its own-model and is the largest-democracy
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Peeved at being left out in the cold, and inviting India instead to rub salt in its wounds, the “People’s Republic of China” (PRC) concluded its week-long campaign condemning liberal democratic systems, and claiming that it is the “largest democracy” in the world.
On the second and final day of the virtually held “Summit for Democracy”, when US President Joe Biden hosted world leaders, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Beijing’s state-controlled media attacked Washington’s “democratic malaise”, the media reported on Saturday.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin maintained that democracy is “a common value of humanity instead of a geostrategic tool” and this week’s virtual Summit was aimed at “defending the US hegemony, which is out-and-out anti-democratic”. “America, the self-styled ‘beacon of democracy, has clear democratic malaise and huge democratic deficits,” he said while extolling the Chinese “model of democracy.”
In the run-up to the Summit, the Chinese government and official media had launched a two-pronged campaign recently, showcasing the strengths of China’s “political system” while pointing out the deficiencies of democratic systems.
A week ago, Beijing had put out a ‘white paper’ on “Democracy that Works”, insisting that one-party Communist-ruled China hosted the world’s largest electoral democratic process.
“In 2016 and 2017, over 900 million voters took part in elections to people’s congresses at the township and county levels — the world’s largest direct elections,” it claimed. But it conveniently forgot to say that the congresses, from top-to-bottom levels, are rubber-stamp bodies that rarely question Communist Party policies, or that what is called “one-candidate elections”, including for the post of President and the Prime Minister, are the norm.
While defending the Communist Party of China’s governance as “democratic”, the paper also warned of the dangers of countries adopting foreign political models. “Blindly copying other models of democracy is a problematic endeavor — it risks creating cultural conflict, political volatility, or even social turmoil and causing great pain to its people.”
China’s official media routinely junk India’s political system as being “chaotic” or “inefficient” to justify why large developing countries are better off following the PRC’s dictatorial model. This week, the official English-language broadcaster China Global Television Network (CGTN) published a commentary headlined “Women’s status in China and India: Who has human rights and democracy?”
Cobbled together at Beijing’s Renmin University, it also said “Biden’s Summit may try to argue that India’s system embodies democracy and human rights, and China’s does not. But that purely verbal claim will not alter the fact that the life and genuine rights of a Chinese woman are far superior to those of an Indian woman.”
“It is only necessary to look at the contrast in the lives of one-fifth of humanity, Chinese and Indian women, to see that China has delivered ‘the people’s rule’ on a gigantic scale and infinitely more than the entirely unreal criteria chosen by Biden.”
The white paper, published by China’s State Council/Cabinet, said the “CPC leadership is the fundamental guarantee” for what it called the “whole-process people’s democracy,” adding that “China did not duplicate Western models of democracy, but created its own.”
“The best way to evaluate whether a country’s political system is democratic and efficient,” the paper insisted, “is to observe whether the succession of its leaders is orderly and in line with the law.”
Interestingly, President Xi Jinping, in 2018, removed term limits for his own office, a key part of the system of succession that had enabled, in the past three decades, three smooth transfers of power.
Now, he is President-for-Life in the world’s “largest democracy”!
