Thread by @MaryGao

Here are some hot takes on the White Paper on Democracy released by the State Council Information Office, just in time for Biden’s Summit on Democracy. I highly recommend reading it; a 🧵

not for the truth or for how “democracy works” in China, but to understand how the CCP justifies its rule, with increased confidence and indeed bravado. As with the subtle troll of a title, China: Democracy That Works, a riff on Putnam’s How Democracy Works on the US.

Paying too much attention to the outright falsehoods is not worth anyone’s time unless you’re dealing with a tankie who has never set foot in the PRC and might actually believe some of the drivel. Sadly important these days with borders closed and information more controlled.

But who really believes stuff like “In China, personal liberty has developed to an extent never before seen in several thousand years of history. Creativity and potential for innovation have been fully unleashed, and people enjoy freedom of speech and mobility.”

The most interesting bits are when the CCP is defending its authoritarianism, couched in democratic terms. Some of this is not new at all; the PRC has always defended its rule as some variant of socialist democracy, even the Cultural Revolution was “big democracy.”

Reform-era CCP has always had a materialist explanation for whatever democratic stage China was at. I’ll write something longer at some point, but here are some interesting claims made in the paper.

Claim 1: Democracy in China, which includes the People’s Congresses, the CPPCC, workplace democracy, grassroots self-governance, are all in the service of authoritarianism. They improve the governance of the CCP, which then improves the livelihood of the people.

Authoritarianism, esp. single-party rule, is a requirement of China’s accomplishments. As on page 5, “dictatorship serves democracy.” The Party rules for the people. Leninism 101.

Claim 2: This system has been significantly improved since XJP’s rule began in 2012 with China reaching the material conditions that have made institutional reforms possible. All previous periods, from 1840 to 1949, were failed attempts at Westernization and Western borrowing.

(Yeah, Yeah, Marx was German, but this point is never raised). China is now doing something different, with its own culture and traditions forefronted. The CCP is rejecting liberal democracy not because China isn't ready for it, which had been the materialist explanation offered.

but rather because China is not culturally suited for it. China is a “multiparty cooperation (sic) system in which the CCP exercises state power.” This is the crux of China's democratic claims. The Party leads everything in service of the people.

Claim 3: Liberal democracy creates disunity and polarization; China’s democracy unifies the people’s interests toward a common goal. This claim must assume that conflicts of interest, class conflict, regional inequality, and other forms of contention are abnormal when expressed.

This is a big change from the Hu-Wen Era, which accepted these conflicts as a consequence of rapid economic development. Under XJP, these must be suppressed and so they have. (However, I wouldn’t say that these problems have been solved, quite the contrary.)

Finally, “the best way to evaluate whether a country’s political system is democratic and efficient is to observe whether the succession of its leaders is orderly and in line with the law.” This is a direct critique of January 6, 2021 and the siege of the US Capitol. But,

is it also a subtle challenge to Xi? The next political succession in China has been disrupted by his removal of term limits. We don’t know when XJP will step down, we don’t know how, we don’t know who will succeed him. Perhaps this White Paper is also calling out Xi Jinping.