Democracy should not be a U.S.-made Coca-Cola that tastes the same everywhere in the world, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Friday, stressing that there is not a fixed model for democracy.
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I am a Chinese person.
The traditional Western definition of a democracy is “a form of government where power is vested in the people and expressed through elections”. By this definition, China is highly undemocratic because there aren’t genuine competitive elections on any level.
The word “democracy” (民主) as used in Mainland China means “a system of government where leaders respond to the needs and demands of the people”. This is slightly different in that a government doesn’t need to be elected to be democratic, it just needs to be responsive to popular demand. China’s government, especially at local levels, is very responsive to local demands, even more so than in the USA (have experienced both personally). So by this slightly different definition, China is democratic.
In Western political philosophy, China’s definition is actually “benevolent government”, not “democracy”. You can argue that being democratic would actually just be meaningless under the Western definitions if the government isn’t benevolent, and I would agree wholeheartedly. But unfortunately English sticks to the Western definitions which is why the statement “China is democratic” will raise eyebrows when said to a crowd of English speakers.
In America you can change the party but not the policies. In China, you can change the policies but not the party.
Democracy, the way you and western chauvinists describe it, is nonsense. “Power is vested in the people” is absolutely meaningless apart from a government doing what is desired. In all western countries, these 2 requirements come in complete contradiction. Elections only allow you to choose someone who will not do what you really want and need materially anyways (because their interests are only to convince you once in 4 years to vote for them, but each party is only really competing against the party next to them, and so both move simultaneously in the direction of helping those in power and the ratchet stays). China’s definition is much more truthful. Democracy can only be measured by how it achieves what it’s populace desires. China is leagues ahead of the west in this way
The idea that they’re not elected is nonsensical though. They are elected at the local level, and then climb.
Not only that but there is absolutely no western democracy where you can replace a candidate with a simple majority vote. If we had the ability to get any candidate thrown out of their role by simple majority vote of the constituency we would have a fucking field day getting every single person in government thrown out of their positions until we got people that were actually doing what the people wanted them to do. This policy alone makes China significantly more democratic than the western democracies. Like holy shit we could get literally ANY person thrown out of government if we had that power, it would be fucking easy. We don’t have that power in western systems because it’s a massive pressure to keep popular support.
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