IN 2014, Tony Abbott, then the prime minister of Australia, embarrassed himself a little by gushing over Chinese President Xi Jinping’s talk of China becoming “democratic”. Specifically Mr Xi said China had the goal of becoming “a modern socialist country that is prosperous, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious” by the middle of the 21st century. Mr Abbott responded in wonderment that he had never before heard of a Chinese leader promising full democracy by 2050. He could have done with an explanation of what China’s leader means by “democracy”. What did Mr Xi really mean?
Chinese official language is full of political terms that, to the Western liberal ear, sound progressive. The Chinese government has long said it protects “human rights”. It has a Western-sounding constitution that says the country enjoys the “freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly” and so on. In October 2014, the Communist Party’s Central Committee held a plenary session on “rule of law”, in which it fully endorsed the constitution. But China prefers a narrow economic definition of “human rights”, and none of these declared freedoms, nor the authority of the constitution itself, goes so far as to protect anyone who challenges the Communist Party’s rule. Ilham Tohti, a university professor, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2014 for criticising the party’s ethnic policies.
The word “democracy”, or “minzhu”, is relatively new in Chinese, added to the language by Japanese writers during Japan’s Meiji Restoration more than a century ago (along with the word “freedom”, or "ziyou"). In the early 1900s “democracy” had the same meaning as it did in the West—and after the fall of the Qing dynasty China even held real elections in 1912–13. But democracy didn’t stick. The victor of those polls, Song Jiaoren, was assassinated before he could become prime minister, and decades of turmoil and civil war followed. In leading the communists to power Mao incorporated the word "democracy” into party-speak to gain popular support. But what Mao actually meant in 1949 became clear when he declared that China would be ruled by a “people’s democratic dictatorship”.
Incorporated into the first line of the constitution, that phrase is still very much in use today. It also says that the country’s legislators are chosen through “democratic elections” and that its state-owned enterprises “practise democratic management through congresses of workers and staff”. This is socialist democracy in the sense that the party believes itself to represent the people. None of this bears any resemblance to Western democracy and its institutions. Mr Xi has made clear that Western-style democracy is not for China, and under his leadership authorities have cracked down hard on lawyers and intellectuals who have pushed for constitutional and democratic rights. Independent political parties are banned. That said, there is a chance that the “democratic” China of the future may look different from how it looks now. The Communist Party tinkers from time to time with democratic concepts around the edges, experiments that in theory could lead to, say, a Singapore-style government where popular elections are held, but one party dominates. By 2050, perhaps real democracy could even be flourishing in China with the blessing of a future Communist Party leader. But for now the “democratic” China Mr Xi has in mind is very different from how Westerners understand the word.
