Democracy With Chinese Characteristics

Over the years, we’ve had “Marxism with Chinese characteristics”, “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”.

A new 74-page white paper, the first of its kind, entitled The Building of Political Democracy in China was co-incidentally issued on the very day US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld addressed a group of elite Communist Party academics in Beijing. Rumsfeld called for a move towards more openness and accountability in government, but there is no sign of that in this white paper – it only makes it very clear that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is unwilling to relinquish its monopoly of power any time soon.

Regrettably, the document shows that “the building” has barely even reached the foundation stage, while the concept of democracy contained therein is pretty much unrecognisable as anything worthy of the name.

In fact there is very little in the Chinese political process that could be described as democratic. Yes, there are elections for some village committees, but those “elections” are tightly controlled by the Communist Party and guess what? Village committees are not actually part of the official government structure.

Needless to say, there are no plans in the white paper to allow elections in townships that form the lowest tier of Chinese Government and this despite the fact that Premier Wen told British Prime Minister Tony Blair last month that township elections were on the agenda.

In a recent high profile case the village of Taishi in Guangdong Province attempted to oust their corrupt local Communist Party chief. The provincial authorities duly hired gangs of thugs to sort out the “troublemakers”. Several journalists and civil rights activists were beaten up along with those local residents opposing the chief. Chinese police then moved in and arrested at least one member of almost every household in the village and informed them that they would be sent down for three years unless their families gave up their opposition to the chief, who of course has retained his position.

The Beijing Government declared the Taishi affair as an “important political incident”, which means it was taken very seriously indeed. The CCP’s prime buzzword, both in this white paper and when talking to Western politicians and diplomats, is “stability”, which they maintain must be preserved at all costs to allow China’s alleged economic “miracle” to continue.

Ironically, it is precisely because the benefits of this mythical economic “miracle” have been confined to the extremely wealthy Party elite that the mass of the population is losing patience.

The Chinese Government, which is notorious for massaging unpleasant statistics, actually admitted that there were upwards of 74,000 demonstrations of public unrest in 2004 – up from 58,000 the previous year. Even for a country the size of Mainland China that is a huge number, which indicates that something is seriously wrong in the country. It is quite clear that the country is extremely unstable and the reason for that is the gross misrule of the CCP.

The CCP’s white paper states that: “China’s democracy is a democracy guaranteed by the people’s democratic dictatorship.” It would be more accurate to simply state: “China is a totalitarian dictatorship.” – full stop. Even in the early days China never came close to the Marxist ideal of a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Instead, it was the Leninist idea of a dictatorship of the vanguard of the proletariat, namely the Communist Party elite, which held sway. That vanguard has become steadily richer to the point where we have the bizarre scenario that most of the high rollers in Asia’s casinos are CCP officials from China. Australian universities are teeming with students from Mainland China whose rich parents invariably pay fees up front. When one considers that most Australians cannot afford to pay up front fees and the vast majority of the 1.3 billion Mainland Chinese earn the equivalent of a few dollars a week, you don’t have to be a genius to realise that the Chinese elite have become fabulously wealthy.

Indeed, the gap between rich and poor in China is widening more rapidly than anywhere else in the world. China now has the worst kind of rampant, unregulated dog-eat-dog capitalism on one level. Yet all the major financial institutions are still owned by the Government and often seem to be run primarily for the benefit of CCP officials, requiring large unsecured loans for a variety of dubious business enterprises. For the white paper to call it a “socialist political democracy with its own characteristics” is little better than a sick joke. One would certainly concede that it has “its own characteristics” and those certainly have nothing whatsoever to do with either democracy or genuine socialism.

Article VII of the white paper states that: “In March 2004, an amendment to the Constitution was adopted by the Second Session of the 10th National People’s Congress, which included the statement ‘the state respects and safeguards human rights’ in the Constitution, thus ushering in a new chapter in the progress of China’s human rights undertakings.” Sounds good, but it would be interesting to hear what the hundreds of thousands of residents of China’s comprehensive network of labour camps think about that. Spiritual groups not controlled by the government and journalists or dissidents critical of the government are ruthlessly stamped on. They have no human rights in the generally accepted sense of the term. What they effectively have is what the CCP terms as “human rights with Chinese characteristics”.

At the end of the day what we really need from China is not a load of gobbledygook in which terms that the rest of the world clearly understand in a particular way are ridiculously redefined and warped into something completely different. What the overwhelming majority of the Chinese nation, together with the democratic nations of the world, want to hear is that the country will move to a political system where the government of the day is chosen by the people and is accountable to the people. A social system which values the lives and welfare of its citizens and a legal system which is independent and not used as a tool of political oppression.

President Hu and Premier Wen have so far not delivered and no doubt need to free themselves of the shackles placed upon them by Jiang Zemin’s supporters, who still dominate the Politburo, before they can embark on any significant programme of reform.

The question is, how long are the Chinese people prepared to wait for the ”new guard” to act before they decide to take matters into their own hands?