[In recent years, the party has preferred to highlight its Marxist roots and talk about the unique nature of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and its “scientific” approach to governance. Xi has repeatedly declared that liberal multiparty democracy will never work in China.]
These are among the odd arguments
and analogies deployed in recent days during a Chinese Communist Party
propaganda blitz to claim that China is as much a democracy as the United
States. After China was excluded — along with Russia and other nations deemed autocratic — from Biden’s “Summit for
Democracy” this week, Chinese state media, think tanks and officials have lined
up to take potshots at the event.
But aside from mudslinging and
off-color humor, the campaign also betrays Beijing’s desire to redefine
international norms and present its controlling, one-party political system as
not just legitimate but ideologically superior to liberal multiparty
democracies.
[Taiwan
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A decade ago, China’s ambition to
change the world’s political structures was less clear, but “now I think they
genuinely do want to change the world on an ideological level,” said Charles
Parton, an associate fellow at the Council on Geostrategy, a British think
tank.
The former British diplomat added
that the propaganda messages may appear ineffective to Western observers, but
they will strike a chord with Beijing’s intended domestic audience and help
Chinese President Xi Jinping legitimize his monopoly on power.
“It’s saying to the Chinese people
that ‘we are the best,’ ” Parton
said. “The summit is the trigger, but more generally China is keen to diminish
the ideological power of the U.S. because doing so increases its own.”
The party’s claim to embody a form
of democracy is not new. Being a “people’s democratic dictatorship” is written
into the constitution of the People’s Republic. But China’s recent defense of
its democratic credentials has been unusually direct.
“It’s presented more confidently
and much more definitively as a different kind of system and as a rejection of
Western-style democracy,” said Mary Gallagher, director of the International
Institute at the University of Michigan.
In recent years, the party has
preferred to highlight its Marxist roots and talk about the unique nature of
“socialism with Chinese characteristics” and its “scientific” approach to governance.
Xi has repeatedly declared that liberal multiparty democracy will never work in
China.
Even before Xi reasserted party control over Chinese
society, calls for liberal democracy were never tolerated. The party has
repeatedly crushed demands for free and fair elections, whether during the
military crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, jailing dissident Liu Xiaobo in 2009
or silencing critics in Hong Kong.
Global rankings of national
democratic institutions regularly label China as an autocracy. The V-Dem
Institute, based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, ranked China 174th
out of 179 countries on its liberal democracy index in 2020. (In the same year, the
United States fell to 31st place from the top 20 2016 and 3rd in 2012.)
A white paper the State Council
Information Office released recently, titled “China: Democracy That Works,”
suggested that Xi’s recently coined “whole-process people’s democracy” was a
legitimate inheritor of the ancient Greek ideal of citizen rule.
The document argues that what
matters isn’t any particular process, such as direct leadership elections, but
rather the outcome — meeting the people’s needs. Among examples it listed as
proof that China’s version of democracy works is “promoting political
stability, unity and vitality” and halting the spread of the coronavirus.
[China
passes history resolution to enshrine open-ended rule of Xi Jinping]
One-party rule, rather than being a
hindrance to democratization, is its guarantor. “It is no easy job for a
country as big as China to fully represent and address the concerns of its 1.4
billion people. It must have a robust and centralized leadership,” the
paper states.
The drier descriptions in official
documents have been mixed with colorful commentaries from state media. One by
Xinhua News Agency likened the United States to Voldemort — and, by
implication, the Chinese Communist Party to Harry Potter — to cast shade on
U.S.-style democracy.
“Just like young Voldemort was a
star of the wizarding world in his youth, American-style democracy’s early
development was an innovation,” the article said. “But just as Voldemort went down
an evil path, so has American-style democracy over time gradually changed and
decayed.”
The weakening of democratic norms
in the United States has emboldened Beijing’s propagandists to be more
determined to present the party as building a coherent and superior system of
governance
“The U.S. has long been an example
— bad or good — that China pays close attention to,” said Gallagher of the
University of Michigan. “If the U.S. struggles in the next few national
elections, that will be important in deciding how China moves forward with this
re-articulation of its own political system.”
To deflect criticism in
multilateral forums, Beijing has increasingly reappropriated contested ideas
such as human rights and justified its actions by supplying alternative models.
China has defended the mass internment of Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other mostly Muslim
people in Xinjiang as a novel approach to “counterterrorism.” It
justifies roundups of human rights lawyers as strengthening
China’s “rule of law” and invokes “national security” to crush pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
This tactic, which may appear to be
Orwellian doublespeak to critics, has allowed Beijing to make progress in
weaponizing such rhetoric at the United Nations, where it often rebuffs liberal
democracies’ concerns by collecting signatures, votes and statements from
partner nations.
“What started as a limited,
defensive argument has now morphed into a more assertive — you could say
aggressive — position that makes sweeping claims about why the Chinese mode of
governance is superior,” said Eva Pils, a scholar at King’s College London who
studies Chinese law.
After China and Russia’s
ambassadors to the United States jointly opposed the democracy summit as the
product of a “Cold War mentality,” Pakistan, one of China’s closest diplomatic
and military partners, announced on Wednesday that it would not take up an
invitation to join.
The extent to which China wants to
revise the existing international order is a live debate,” but “I would read
more recent moves as an indication that the goal is to build a countervailing
sphere of influence,” rather than merely weaken liberal principles, Pils said.
Lyric Li in Seoul and Pei Lin Wu in
Taipei contributed to this report.
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