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Will the next fifty years be peaceful or war-torn? The climate change negotiations in Copenhagen have a big part to play in that, but another determining factor is the political direction of China. As China becomes more wealthy, and its people become more protective of their property and their rights, will the People’s Republic transform itself into something more democratic, or will it drive towards repression?

At the moment, the government’s rhetorical approach is to push every sort of democracy other than the sort that involves them losing power. Free elections, argues this piece in China Daily are not the democracy you are looking for. Here’s an extract:

Before Chairman Mao Zedong declared the founding of the People’s Republic on Oct 1, 1949, he was challenged by Huang Yanpei, a well-known non-Communist educator. Huang asked Mao: Throughout Chinese history, no dynasty could survive the historical cycle, in that every dynasty was vigorous in its initial years and became prosperous, but then declined and finally collapsed. Can you Chinese Communists manage to move beyond this cycle?

Mao was confident and told Huang, “Yes”. Because, “We have an advanced political regiment, we have democracy which allows the people to supervise the government,” Mao said.

There have been zigzags in the exploration to realize this democracy in Mao’s mind, and there were even deviations from that goal when efficiency was emphasized. But democracy has become the commonly accepted value of younger generations of CPC leaders.

In 2006, the 6th Plenary Session of the 16th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China summarized the participatory democracy into the following four rights: Right to know, right to participate, right to expression and right to monitor or supervise. These four rights can be regarded as the cornerstone of China’s participatory democracy.

Of course, there have been obstacles in the course of people’s enjoyment of these rights. There have been cases of abuses of power. But we have been moving to improve our system to honor these rights, and we also see encouraging signs that ordinary people and individuals are acting to practice these rights.

By all means, more and more people in China have come to realize the significance of participatory democracy. Extensive participatory democracy can benefit individuals and society at large better than free elections.

What is interesting to me there is that an official Government organ is not making a case against western democracy in concept (as, for example, Islamists do), but is supporting the principle of democracy while arguing about the means.

This doesn’t mean that China is going to turn democratic any time soon, or at all. The Soviet Union kept up its pretence of ‘human rights’ even as it condemned thousands to the Gulag. It shows, though, some awareness in the Chinese state that ‘movement’ towards democracy, even if a watered-down consultative form, might be on the cards.

Longer-term, there are going to be big decisions to take and possibly big crises, but at least the rhetorical underpinnings of the Chinese state are ‘popular sovereignty’ rather than the certainties of theocracy.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 10:13 am and is filed under Books and articles, Democratization, Nationalism & Internationalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.