TAIPEI- From December 9th to 10th, U.S. President Biden convened a two-day online “democracy summit” from the governments, civil society and private sector leaders of 110 countries around the world. Countries such as China and Russia were not invited to participate. Although the summit did not directly criticize China, the approach of inviting Taiwan and Hong Kong dissident Luo Guancong is undoubtedly a clear challenge to the Chinese Communist Party. Before and after the summit, the Chinese government carried out a series of “counter-control” actions with great fanfare, including holding large-scale online international conferences, publishing white papers praising Chinese democracy and criticizing American democracy, and mobilizing state media to carry out massive propaganda.
The Communist Party of China Pushes “China’s Democracy”
On December 9-10, US Eastern Time, President Biden convened leaders of governments, civil society, and private sectors from 110 countries around the world to formally hold a two-day online “democracy summit”. The three themes set up by the Global Democracy Summit are strengthening democracy, fighting against autocracy, fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights. Biden delivered speeches on the opening and closing days.
Although not directly criticizing China by name, the summit invited Luo Guancong, a Hong Kong dissident from Taiwan and exiled to Britain, to participate, which is tantamount to a blatant provocation for the Chinese government. The Chinese government has not been silent, and has held a series of “Chinese version” of democracy propaganda and the US democracy summit to “confrontation” with great fanfare.
Beijing political observer Kai Bo (pseudonym) believes that the US Democracy Summit is a very serious impact on the Chinese Communist Party. He believes that the timing of the Democratic Summit, which is after the Sixth Plenary Session and before the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, is a big taboo for the CCP.
He told VOA: “Beijing has never been so eager to pretend to be the most democratic country in the world while slandering American democracy. The democratic summit and the fermentation of democratic issues are actually a threat to Xi Jinping. The issue of re-election. Because there is no voice in the country, the international community is a direct threat. Beijing has completed the establishment of a new centralization mechanism in the past nine years, and the new centralization mechanism cares about ideology. Ideology and democracy are the legitimacy of the regime. The key. This is the fundamental reason why they are highly sensitive to democratic issues and any ideology.”
On December 1-4, Guangzhou held the “Understanding China” conference. Chinese leader Xi Jinping emphasized through the video that “to understand China today, one must understand the Communist Party of China”. Online attendees included 15 international dignitaries including former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and First Deputy Chairman of the Russian State Duma Ivan Melnikov.
On December 2, the China Public Diplomacy Association held a “Chinese and foreign scholars on democracy” dialogue in Beijing. When attending the meeting, Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng said that individual countries pretend to be democratic leaders. What kind of “democratic summits” are convened, artificially dividing the countries of the world into three or sixty-nine classes, and labeling them as “democratic” and “non-democratic” is false. In the name of democracy, it is anti-democratic. On the same day, during a video consultation with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Morgulov, Le Yucheng stated that the so-called democratic summit is a farce, a typical Cold War mentality.
On December 4, the State Council of China issued the white paper “China’s Democracy”. The full text is more than 20,000 characters long and praises the Chinese Communist Party for leading the people to realize the whole process of people’s democracy. The white paper emphasizes that “whether a country is democratic should be judged by the people of this country, and should not be judged by a small number of outsiders.”
Regarding the self-praising of the Chinese government, Wen Zhao, the director of the YouTube channel of “Wen Zhao talks about the past and the present” commented that China’s “full process democracy” is actually “the whole process without democracy”, which is a rhetoric of the party culture of the Chinese Communist Party. operate.
He told VOA: “Just as Orwell said in “1984”, freedom equals slavery and war equals peace. He changed the meaning of two words with completely opposite meanings and equated them. Chinese leading cadres do not change. For lifelong tenure, he said it was “orderly replacement of the leadership”, so it turned out to be disordered once every two terms. Then the opening of reform and opening up is called “grasping the right direction of reform and opening up”. Power failure is called “orderly use of electricity”. ‘.”
The international community does not buy into Chinese democracy
On December 5, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a 14,000-word bilingual “State of Democracy in the United States” in English and Chinese, accusing American politics of having reduced to “money politics,” which is called one person, one vote, and it is actually ruled by a small number of elites. Long article bombards the United States for “democracy practice is chaotic,” “exporting so-called democracy produces evil results,” accusing the United States of being a “democracy beacon” and incurring global criticism.
On December 6, the “Ten Questions of American Democracy” Research Report Release and Seminar, sponsored by the Chongyang Institute of Finance, Renmin University of China, was held in Beijing. At the beginning of the report, the U.S. Democracy Summit was called the “new international show” and raised ten questions about U.S. democracy. It emphasized that “there is no solitaire model of democracy in the world.” One set of roads imposed by force”. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian repeated these ten questions at the regular meeting, including “Is American democracy a democracy of the majority or a democracy of the minority?”, “Is it to achieve checks and balances of power or lead to abuse of power?”, “Is it to safeguard the world? Peace or destruction of international order?” etc.
On December 7, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying also posted ten tweets on her Twitter with the theme of “Ten Questions”. Chinese state media including People’s Daily, Guangming Daily and China Central Television were even more numerous. Publish the contents of the report substantially.
Zhao Suisheng, a professor at the Joseph Kerber School of International Relations at the University of Denver, believes that the recent reports released by the Chinese government have factual basis for criticism of the United States, because the United States is really not doing well now: “The United States is A kind of declining democracy, so we can find a large basket of questions about American democracy.”
Zhao Suisheng told VOA: “But the self-promotion of the (Communist Party) is ridiculous. The Chinese people have freedom of association, freedom of strike, and freedom of protest. This is nothing short of open-eyed talk. Now who dares to arrogantly talk about the Central Committee. , The slightest loss of officialdom, the more serious it is to go to jail. There is no such basic democratic right, not to mention the right to freely elect the government and leaders, and the right to elect leaders. Now leaders have to practice life, and no one can Stand up publicly to express opposition.”
On December 4-5, the “Democracy: Common Value of All Mankind” International Forum Conference was held in Beijing. Xinhua News Agency quoted participants from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Senegal, Portugal, Tanzania, Brazil and other countries as saying that there is no exactly the same democracy in the world, and the United States should not impose a single value on the people of all countries.
Zhao Suisheng commented on this: “China’s soft power has almost no market in Western countries. However, some non-Western countries, especially some economically underdeveloped countries, have some positive comments on some of China’s practices. People from these countries come out. I don’t think it’s strange to say this. It also shows that the current world is a very complex world, not a pure opposition between democracy and autocracy. This is what Biden said, and I think it’s too simplistic.”
The “Economist Intelligence Unit” (Economist Intelligence Unit) of the British “Economist” released in March this year the democratic rankings of 167 countries and regions in the world, with Norway as the first and North Korea as the last. China ranks 151st and 16th from the bottom. Taiwan ranks 11th, surpassing the United States, which ranks 25th.
The 2021 report released by Freedom House, a research institute in New York, shows that in almost all the options for political rights, such as “whether leaders are elected through open and fair elections” and “whether the legislature is through open and fair elections?” “Elected”, “Do people have the right to choose different political parties”, “Do different political parties have a chance to gain power”, etc. China’s scores are all zero.
The CCP cannot admit that it has given up democracy
Regarding the recent Chinese government’s almost obsessive approach to redefining democracy, Kaibo analyzed that the CCP has actually fallen into a kind of discourse poverty and there is no new concept. He told VOA: “Although the Communist Party uses governance to reduce the power of democracy, when the international community criticizes China for being undemocratic, the CCP found that democracy cannot be abandoned. Although it is a decoration, this decoration is Chinese. Pain. Nothing can hide this. This is the core and most vulnerable part of the Chinese regime.”
Zhao Suisheng analyzed that even for authoritarian regimes, democracy should be used to decorate the facade, although their interpretation of the meaning of democracy is completely different.
He said: “Democracy has been a positive thing since China entered the modernization process from the West and passed through Japan. The intellectual elite in China, including the Communist Party itself, has pursued democracy for many years. They criticized it. The Kuomintang criticizes all political opponents, saying that they are undemocratic, dictatorship, and dictatorship. Even Mao Zedong would say’people’s democratic dictatorship.’ This term sounds strange. How does democracy go with dictatorship? Dictatorship is dictatorship. But. He added this democracy to the front as if dictatorship was legal. So this word has a function that is difficult to replace in Chinese political vocabulary.”
After the U.S. Democracy Summit came to a close on December 10, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs published another critical article on its official website. The article said, “Relevant surveys show that 72% of Americans believe that the United States is no longer a model of democracy for other countries to emulate, and 81% of Americans believe that American democracy faces serious domestic threats. 44% of the global respondents believe that the United States is The biggest threat to global democracy, 52% of the European Union people believe that the US democratic system is invalid.”
On the same day, CCTV News quoted the US media’s criticism of the summit, with the title “hypocritical summit”, saying that “multi-national media and experts debunked the so-called democratic summit, saying that this conference was just a vain attempt to use ideology as a tool to provoke conflict and confrontation and defend the United States. Hegemony.” Xinhua News Agency also found out the major English-language media’s commentary on the summit, and sneered at the summit with the title “It’s done!”
Wen Zhao analyzed that the CCP’s attitude towards democracy has gone through three stages. The first stage is from the Deng Xiaoping era to the early stage of Jiang Zemin. Democracy is not publicly denied. Democracy is still the direction of China’s political progress, although 1989 was a major turning point. In the Hu-Wen period, China’s openness has expanded, which has also caused a lot of ideological and conceptual shocks. The main reason is that “China’s economic level is not enough, and it is not suitable for one person, one vote democracy.” “But at this stage of Xi Jinping, there is a fundamental reversal. That is to say, we have achieved democracy, and it is true democracy. On the contrary, the West is a fake democracy.”
Wen Zhao told the Voice of America: “So recently, the whole point is to turn black and white. In fact, it means that the CCP has no flexibility and has lost any motivation to make changes in the political system. But in order to maintain their current status, they only have one. This kind of propaganda means that we have achieved democracy. The things we want to persist in unchanged are precisely democratic.”
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