Whole-process people's democracy the backbone of China's society

Editor's note: The International Forum on Democracy: Shared Human Values is to be held in March in China. What are the characteristics of China's democracy? Does Western skepticism against China's political system hold water? How are people's interests represented in China's political mechanisms? Democracy in China is a three-part series analyzing the above questions. The first essay delves into China's whole-process people's democracy. Robert Lawrence Kuhn is a CGTN anchor, a public intellectual, an international corporate strategist, and an investment banker. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

China's whole-process people's democracy is a mysterious phrase to Westerners, who assume that the country's political system, which has neither multiple parties nor general elections, can be in no way democratic.

Yet, when Chinese President Xi Jinping explains China's Second Centenary Goal of building "a modern socialist country" by 2049, he uses six aspiration adjectives – prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious and beautiful, and the third is "democratic." "Democracy, a shared value of humanity, is a key tenet unswervingly upheld by the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Chinese people" to be used to solve the problems that the people want to solve, President Xi said.

The Party's call is to expand the orderly political participation of the people, to strengthen the protection of human rights and the rule of law, and to ensure that the people enjoy extensive rights and freedoms in accordance with the law.

Democracy in the Party-led system involves absorbing public opinion via feedback mechanisms, such as polling, to discern what people think about proposed new policies, a process that the Party calls pooling people's wisdom. Even though there are no elections in the Western sense, there is a good deal of engagement with different constituencies.

To enhance whole-process people's democracy, China upholds and improves the people's congress system to properly and effectively exercise its power of oversight. Moreover, the work reports of Party leadership at Party congresses every five years, and of the government at the National People's Congress every year, reflect a great deal of input and suggestions from all relevant officials, experts and constituencies.

For those foreigners who marvel at how China won the war to eradicate extreme poverty, I point out that the common root is the CPC's leadership and organizational capacity. I have been coming to China for more than 30 years. I have traveled across China, visiting over 100 cities. Yet, as much as I thought I knew China, I did not appreciate all that is required for poverty alleviation until I visited poor regions, especially remote mountain villages and spoke with poor villagers.

It was in 2013 that China proposed the concept of targeted poverty alleviation. "Targeted" means standardized procedures and individualized programs to bring each poor family out of poverty. Five levels of local Party secretaries coordinate their roles – provincial, municipal, county, township and village. Third-party evaluations are conducted regularly and randomly to ensure accuracy and honesty.

I was startled to discover that every poor family in China has its own file – that's millions of poor families, each with its own customized plan, each checked monthly and digitized for central compilation and analysis. Equally startling, local officials are dispatched to impoverished villages to manage poverty alleviation, sometimes for two years or more.

My friends in China ask: Why does the world misunderstand the Party?

The problem I argue is partly semantics, because the English word "party" connotes, in democratic political systems, a political party that competes in free and open multi-party elections. When a ruling party does not compete in free and open multi-party elections, that political system is deemed not democratic.

This portrait mispaints the Chinese system, which is founded on a different principle, where the Party is the ruling organization, not a competing political party. It is a Party of dedicated elites from all sectors of society, consisting of around 7 percent of the population but tasked to represent the fundamental interests of all Chinese population.

Thus, the Party as the ruling party is not the equivalent of a ruling political party in Western systems, where political parties represent only a certain group of voters and are time-bound by election cycles.

For this reason, the CPC has a higher and broader obligation to enhance the living standards and personal well-being of all Chinese citizens. This includes reforms, the rule of law, transparency in government, public participation in governance, increasing democracy, freedoms, and human rights.

These are real challenges. All political systems and all political parties have trade-offs. Achieving national objectives like eradicating poverty is indeed an advantage of China's Party-led system. However, it is not the only criterion for evaluating systems. This is why continuing reforms, opening-up and system improvements are needed.

For China, poverty alleviation exemplifies human rights. And for the Party, to develop democracy and governance is both a mission and a challenge.

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