重装机兵3手机版金手指:China is exploring a new political system

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China is exploring a new political system

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2011-7-2 11:53



By Han Shasha


China represents a secular culture where learning from others is prized. The Chinese have developed a remarkable capacity for selective learning and adaptation to new challenges.


In the past years, China has learnt a lot from the West, it is learning and will learn in the future. And what it learnt in many ways has overtaken the original ones.


Although China still face many challenges, is likely to continue to evolve on the basis of these ideas, rather than by embracing Western liberal democracy, because these ideas have apparently worked and have blended reasonably well with common sense and China’s unique political culture, the product of several millennia — including 20 or so dynasties, seven of which lasted longer than the whole of U.S. history.


Government as a necessary virtue. In China’s long history, prosperous times were all associated with an enlightened, strong state. Contrary to the American view of state as a necessary evil, China’s transformation has been led by an enlightened developmental state. And contrary to Mikhail Gorbachev, who abandoned his old state and then found his empire shattered, Deng Xiaoping reoriented China’s old state from pursuing the Maoist utopia to promoting modernization.


The Chinese state, however flawed, is capable of shaping national consensus on modernization and pursuing hard strategic objectives, such as enforcing banking sector reforms, developing renewable energies and stimulating China’s economy against the global downturn.


China has resolves the “bad emperor” problem. First, Chinese top leaders are all selected according to their talents and performances rather than hereditary style. Second, in China, every leader has a given tenure of office, like what in the US, two terms. Third, China adopts collective leadership among the top level leaders, autocracy is unnecessary in China.


China rejects the stereotypical dichotomy of democracy vs. autocracy and holds that the nature of a state, including its legitimacy, has to be defined by its substance, i.e. by good governance, and tested by what it can deliver.


As a "civilization-type state," China has completely different cultural traditions from Western countries. This is the starting point for us to promote political reform. The most important features of the Western tradition are a series of customs, habits and institutions based on individualism, whereas Chinese customs, habits and institutions are more based on families and the relationship derived from families.


Given the differences in cultural traditions, the right way of constructing democracy should be combining our own cultural tradition to launch systemic innovation while avoiding disadvantages, rather than transforming our culture to adapt to Western culture and a political system under the influence of Western culture.


It is important for the Chinese government to follow three principles based on its experience from the Reform and Opening Up when exploring new ways to build democracy suitable for its actual conditions.


First, it should take the road of gradual reforms. There is no such thing as a perfect plan. The central government should take into consideration the actual conditions of the country, proceed step by step, conduct experiments and encourage the people to make innovations. It is like groping forward by feeling for stones to cross a river.


As long as we do not stop moving, we will finally find the stones and cross the river, meaning that we will definitely form a relatively sound new democratic system in the end. Like economic reforms, China does not have a road map, but rather a compass. Under the established general directions and strategies,  China should encourage each region to carry out bold explorations and experiments so as to gradually find a way to democracy that is in line with both China's contexts and the conditions of its people.


The second is domestic demand. The reforms should start by meeting China's effective demand and only the reforms driven by effective domestic demand can be relatively stable. Effective domestic demand means the actual domestic demand based on the ideas, culture and conditions of the people in a country, which is the greatest inherent driving force. Presently, China's greatest domestic demand is the development of an anti-corruption system, an intra-Party democratic system, a service-oriented government and a society under the rule of law.


The third is livelihood. This means that China's key task is to improve the livelihood and the development of democracy should pragmatically focus on enhancing the public standard of living in both level and scope, enabling the government to provide the common people with better services and making the people lead safer, more free and more well-off and dignified lives.


A key reason behind the failures of democratic experiments in many developing countries lies in that the countries advanced democracy by simply copying  Western-style democracy, resulting in the idleness of the political machine, endless domestic friction and worse instead of better lives for the common people. Naturally, such democratic experiments cannot go far.


China can explore a new type of democratic system that is derived from Chinese culture and absorbs strong points from other democratic systems, which will subsequently overtake Western democratic system in terms of both quality and effectiveness.


(Translated and edited from Zhang Weiwei's speech, Zhang Wei-Wei is a professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations)
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