Why China Talks Up Its Own “Democracy”
Beijing sees its political mechanism beyond the "democracy vs. autocracy" narrative
China is no longer cagey about calling itself a democracy. Authored by Xi Jinping, two articles were recently published in the latest issues of the flagship Party journal Qiushi, detailing all of the top leader’s remarks on the twin pillars of “Chinese democracy”—people’s congress system and people’s consultative conferences. These two systems were embodied at the state level by the ongoing “Two Sessions,” the annual gathering of China’s two highest representative organs. Xi has coined the terms “whole-process democracy” and “consultative democracy” to precis the roles of the two institutions, proclaiming that China has blazed its own way to put democracy into practice “not by transplanting the Western political models.”
Xi’s claims might seem heretical to many who loathe to see “China” and “democracy” appear in the same sentence. Joe Biden, for one, labeled his Chinese counterpart a “dictator” immediately after their supposedly ice-breaking meeting in San Francisco, on the grounds that China is “a communist country that's based on a form of government totally different than ours.” When a Republican Senator grilled the Singaporean TikTok CEO for his alleged ties with the Communist Party of China, the same logic applied, that is, anything China-related must be promptly construed as a grave threat because the country is not in the “club of liberal democracies.”
In today’s world, where economic decoupling is still carried out euphemistically under “de-risking,” a decoupling of perceptions is just as manifest as it is poisonous. The arbitrary labeling of different political systems, for starters, will further encroach on the already dwindled common ground where China and the West ought to seek compromise to assuage growing geopolitical tensions. When China is eager to be taken seriously as a democracy, it does not harm to put demagoguery aside and start by grasping China’s political arrangement as it is.
D-word with Chinese characteristics
It is no easy task to get the full picture of the Chinese political mechanism, as it grows out of the world’s oldest continuous civilization with an enormous population and various cultural landscapes. Francis Fukuyama, one of the most preeminent political thinkers in recent times, once acknowledged that “China’s model is sui generis; its specific mode of governance is difficult to describe.” That is to say, its own brand of “democracy” is destined to come out somewhat different than the prescribed template advocated in the Western discourse.
The primary point of divergence between China and the West in the design of their political system is the separation of powers. The National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s parliament-esque organ, is constitutionally at the very top of China’s state power hierarchy. Instead of being subject to the much-vaunted check and balance, this top representative body holds accountable the executive, judiciary and other state branches. Theoretically, its supreme power in the state structure, expounded by the former head of the NPC Standing Committee Peng Zhen in the early 1980s, has been defined in four ways: the power to elect or dismiss national leaders, make state-level legislation, supervise other government branches, make important decisions like waging wars or signing treaties.
Interestingly, this political structure is more genetically similar to the ancient Greek democracy than its counterparts in modern Western countries. The Assembly in the Athenian democracy, just like the NPC, was more of the highest organ of state power than merely a legislative body, as it had the ultimate power to elect top magistrates, monitor other state bodies, and make important decisions for the polis. The supreme power was invested in such a manner because this democratic organ composed the will of the entire demos (Greek word for “the people”).
While the 6,000 attendees of the Assembly spoke for the 60,000 Athenian citizens, the nearly 3,000 deputies to China’s NPC have to represent a population of over 1.4 billion. In contrast, there are 535 voting members on the U.S. Capitol Hill, and the House of Commons in Westminster has 650. The sheer size of the NPC has been a focus for China critics who believe it is too large to be functional. For one thing, these 3,000 deputies just barely cover the more than 2,800 county-level areas in this vast country. Also, the end of each annual “two sessions” does not mean the NPC is shutting down for the year. The NPC’s standing committee, a 175-member permanent body, still meets regularly and carries out legislation and other routines, along with the NPC’s ten special committees overseeing matters in their respective fields of expertise. Those special committees, which held over 500 meetings during the last five-year term, function in a rather similar manner to their counterparts on the U.S. Capitol Hill.
China’s system is hailed as the “whole-process democracy,” because it is designed to be not only widely representative, but also grounded in interactions with the masses. Of all the more than 2.7 million deputies to people’s congresses at all levels, an overwhelming majority serve part-time in this public office with no pay. Instead of posturing and towing the party line like career politicians, they live and work among the ordinary people, and are therefore expected to be more responsive to the voice and concerns at the grassroots.
A high-skilled welder, who got elected to the current 14th NPC, had the deputy chief procurator of Shanghai report to him personally. And a migrant worker from Yunnan Province leveraged his role as a deputy to propose institutional changes at the state level in order to help his fellows based on first-hand knowledge. Last year, a visually impaired deputy made an array of proposals regarding education, employment and transportation for this disabled community, and the relevant government departments swiftly responded to them with potential solutions. These were the examples of “better operation of the people’s congress system,” a new narrative in the official discourse added by Zhao Leji, the head of the 14th NPC Standing Committee.
Apparently, Xi personally attaches great importance to this institution. For the first time in history, a central work conference on people’s congresses was held by China’s top leader in 2021, where he called the people’s congress system “a monumental innovation in human political history made by the Chinese people.” Xi also said, “Democracy is not an ornament to be used for decoration; it is to be used to solve the problems that the people want to solve.” It is a testament to his, or the Party’s political philosophy which favors results rather than formality. From their perspective, whereas electoral campaigns in many Western countries, which often amount to an extremely costly affair, provide voters with occasions for political catharsis, the decision-making processes have often been mired in endless bickering and partisanship, and seldom produced any meaningful results. In a matter of decades, China has managed to achieve a level of industrialization that had taken the developed nations centuries. This achievement would be unthinkable if formality had trumped pragmatism when Chinese leaders put their democratic ideals into practice.
China’s party-state relation has been hotly contested when Westerners talk about China’s status on democratic progress, and the NPC is sometimes referred to as a “rubber stamp” organ operating at the mercy of the will of the Party. In fact, it could be argued that all contemporary politics are essentially party politics. Whether it is a multi-party system, a two-party regime, or China’s unique party dynamics, the voting in parliamentary bodies almost always divides along party affiliations. What is unique about Chinese politics is that the interests of the Communist Party of China are claimed to not just be linked to certain social classes, ethnic groups or big enterprises like political parties in Western countries. As manifested in Jiang Zemin’s theory of “Three Representations,” China’s sole ruling party has to represent the interests of everyone. Should the democratic principle be put into practice through the confrontation of various political forces, or via a constant process of deliberation and consultation? China opts for the latter.
Consensus-Oriented System
China believes it is a common misapprehension that the core of the democratic spirit is voting. And most modern Western countries embrace various vote-centric systems based on this idea. Chances are that those who decided to build democracy this way had the best intentions at heart, but things could easily go awry when such systems start to operate. They sometimes lead to the tyranny of the majority, who tend to optimize their gains at the expense of the few. On other occasions, they breed the tyranny of the minority, who capitalize on the silence of the many when voter turnout is low. The increasingly deeper and extensive political polarization and radicalization in the countries that have such regimes in place are emblematic of their voters’ shared frustration.
China's arrangements for democratic participation go down a different path. It has been designed to forge a consensus among various groups of people by resolving conflicts rather than ginning them up. In 1954, China’s first constitution formally granted equal voting rights to all adult citizens regardless of ethnicity, gender, religion or property, a decade before the U.S. achieved universal suffrage through the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It helps guarantee the world’s largest community-level elections with more than one billion people participating. More importantly, China’s electoral system makes sure the voice of the few can be heard. The electoral law, for instance, stipulates that the ethnic groups with exceptionally small populations shall each have at least one representative. In the current 14th NPC, the non-Han ethnic groups, which account for less than 9% of the population, have taken nearly 15% of the seats.
As argued by John Dryzek, an Australian political scientist, the essence of effective democracies is how able they are to operate as a feedback loop. To form a consensus to the greatest extent, China resorts to democratic deliberation with the widest-possible political participation.
China has devised an advisory mechanism that now runs parallel with the NPC to ensure maximum political inclusion. It is called the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), which consists of representatives from all political parties, people’s organizations, ethnic groups, and social sectors. Drawing wisdom from their respective professional background, these representatives put forward opinions and suggestions on state affairs in order to formulate national policies. The CPPCC’s expert consultation mechanism, for example, is a vital conduit for professional ideas to flow into the formulation of policy suggestions, which will in many cases be adopted by government departments and make an impact nationwide.
In 2003, a CPPCC member made a proposal to exempt farmers from agricultural taxes to ease their burden and bridge the gap between urban and rural areas. Just three years later, that proposal was translated into a landmark national policy, putting an end to the thousands-year-old taxation practice in a traditionally agricultural civilization. China’s latest drive to launch a massive campaign to protect the ecological system of the Yangtze River was also advanced by proposals from CPPCC members. Some trivial issues like roof leakage or lack of fitness facilities could also be raised in consultation meetings. What is known as the “consultative democracy” has now become a key mechanism to generate public will.
Deng Xiaoping once said, “It is the greatest democracy to promote participation.” And the participation refers to not only the representatives, but the people themselves. When China was set to promulgate its first constitution seventy years ago, 150 million Chinese took part in a national debate on its drafting. Today, citizens still express their opinions on legislation through channels such as the Internet or letters. For the drafting of the 14th Five-Year Plan, some one million messages were pooled through the online suggestion box, which led to 366 changes to the original draft.
Since 2014, when the Party embarked on a campaign of “comprehensively promoting law-based governance,” China has striven to diversify the channels that collect public views, one of which is the legislative information office. Citizens are encouraged to go to the over 6,500 such offices across the country and engage in debates on legislation or policy-making. The entire decision-making process is designed to be consensus-oriented, rather than conflict-ridden.
Beijing’s Coping Mechanism
Democracy in China’s sense is one of a kind. Its very existence has challenged conventional Western sensibility, but it is adapting to China’s specific reality. It is a careless distortion that the NPC is merely a “rubber stamp” and that the CPPCC is simply packed with “human-shaped ornaments with their hands clapped over the Party’s decisions.” In the eyes of China’s top decision-makers, they are functioning as channels to pool grassroots opinions and mechanisms that inject fresh blood into political elites. More importantly, the state could thus function with minimal risks of the swing of policy pendulums or societal polarization.
Over the three decades in the wake of the Cold War, the world has seen copious instances of voluntary and involuntary transplants of the Western democratic system, which turn out to have failed to acclimatize in many cases. They were often followed by a surge of social unrest, collapse of the national economy, disintegration of political order, and regression in terms of nation-building. And the spillover effects add to the instability in the already volatile global system as we see today. These acts of weaponizing democratic values serve as grim cautionary tales to Chinese leaders and the public.
Addressing the Davos Forum in 2021, Xi reiterated that democracy is part of “the common values of humanity,” and that the world needs to “rise above ideological prejudice.”
China’s efforts to clarify its own practice of democracy are not intended to spur a contest of social systems. On the contrary, they are the manifestations of a coping mechanism for the long-established “democracy-autocracy” dichotomy that has been intrinsically biased against Beijing. It is not all that important whether China should be accepted as a democracy in the Western discourse. Rather, it is more urgent for the West to bust the myth of “communist dictatorship,” and start to cotton on to the nuance of China’s own way of doing politics. Trying to blindly project China as an ideological pariah does nobody any good. To peacefully coexist, the Western world needs to accept China as it is, and grasping democracy in China’s context will be a good place to start.
Subscribe to Sinical China for more original pieces to help you read Chinese news between the lines. Xu Zeyu, founder of Sinical China, is a senior correspondent with Xinhua News Agency, China’s official newswire. Follow him on Twitter @XuZeyu_Philip
Disclaimer: The published pieces in Sinical China reflect only the authors’ personal opinions, and shall NOT be taken as Xinhua News Agency’s stance or perception.