Tag: Democracy

Is China a Democracy?

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By Ernest Jovan Talwana

One of the hardest – and perhaps most controversial definitions in political literature today is democracy. What is democracy? Who decides what is democratic? Is there a universal value attached to democracy? Do all people, from all cultures, from all histories, and from all social-economic conditions, share common perspectives on what is or is not “democratic?” Is democracy about the processes of governance or the purposes and/or results of governance?

These are relevant and hard questions to settle in our contemporary political world. China is an interesting country to discuss on this topic because it is internationally considered to be among the least democratic countries in the world. (Here, I use the word “internationally” loosely to mostly mean the Western international community.) Out of 176 countries indexed in 2023, China ranked the 172nd least democratic country in the world, with a label of being a “Hard Autocracy.” This is a claim worth inquiring into, and consequently deconstructing. Often, when we talk about a country being “democratic,” we are referring to the values we cherish and thus attach to democracy. But those values are neither universal nor permanently fixed. They are values appreciated differently in different societies.

Every society’s experience, both historical and contemporary, shapes its national value systems, which inform its politics. As such, it would be misleading to assess every country’s political system based on the yardstick of Western understanding on democracy and autocracy. In fact, forcing a particular society’s political-value-standard onto every other society, is the quintessential embodiment of undemocratic behaviour. Therefore, before we understand whether China is a democracy or not, we need to first inquire into whether the label of China being a “Hard Autocracy” is from the billion Chinese people or from the mind of a guy working for a think tank or government agency in a Western capital somewhere.

Indeed, some studies challenge some western main scholarships findings on this topic. For example, Tony Saich, a Daewoo Professor of International Affairs and director of the Ash Centre explains that their 15 years quest to build a firmer understanding of Chinese opinion “found that compared to public opinion patterns in the U.S., in China there is very high satisfaction with the central government” with 95.5% of respondents saying “were either “relatively satisfied” or “highly satisfied” with Beijing. Compared to Gallup’s findings which revealed that only 38% of U.S citizens were satisfied with the American federal government, and aware that democracy is about majority, one can conclude that to brand China “hard autocracy” is nothing but a smear campaign.

China is a very different society from the United States of America, Britain, Norway, or even Uganda. The Chinese have diverse opinions on many things—just like all people in all places—but they share a common set of ideals, interests, or values that they pursue and want to realize. Their ideals shape what is democratic for them, and it doesn’t matter whether that ultimate thing they want out of politics is similar to what Americans or Norwegians want out of their politics.

China has a different set of prerequisites that its citizens follow to both choose and also hold public officials to account. As long as those prerequisites are met within the Chinese system, that process is democratic for them. The problem comes when the world’s all-knowing people from the West criticise the system established and upheld by the billion Chinese people because it doesn’t appeal to the political taste of the handful of millions of Europeans and Americans.

No one other than Chinese citizens has the political right to question China’s intrinsic brand of democracy. It is likely that citizens of Western countries value their democracy because it serves their interests and upholds their ideals and value systems. Those values might differ from what people in other countries, even in the Western world, or within different states in the United States want. But that doesn’t challenge the “democraticness” of their democracy. This principle should be applied when analysing China’s democracy too.

In China, the political administration developed what they conceptualised as a “whole-process people’s democracy.” The Chinese government translated this concept into relevant democratic values, which its public institutions are bound by and which the government strives to realize. China defines the whole-process people’s democracy as one that “integrates process-oriented democracy with results-oriented democracy, procedural democracy with substantive democracy, direct democracy with indirect democracy, and people’s democracy with the will of the state.” They understand this to be a model of socialist democracy that covers all aspects of the democratic process and all sectors of society. For them, it is “a true democracy that works.”

If what the Chinese wanted out of democracy was improved standards of living, their government over the last four decades has achieved that. Who can question whether that is not democracy for them? It is understood that in the Western world, a country is known to be democratic if citizens rise up frequently to challenge government authority. But this understanding of social behaviour blinds one to the nuance that within traditional Chinese philosophy, the preservation of social harmony is what is considered respectable order, not disruptive behavior. As such, Chinese citizens could be getting more from their government by maintaining the orderly political contestation that the ostentatious political activity experienced in the West.

We need to understand that democracy is not a decorative piece of ribbon picked and worn by every country to show off. It is rather an instrument through which public concerns are addressed. As long as China addresses the concerns of the Chinese people, that is democracy for them. The level of efficiency and order in the Chinese government are not questioned often. That is a big vote for the trust the citizens have in the democracy of China.

The author is a research fellow at the Development Watch Center.

 

Where Will Africa’s Democratization Come From?

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By Nnanda Kizito Sseruwagi

The title of this Op-ed should not mislead us into thinking that I suggest a possibility of African countries being undemocratic. All of them are aligned towards democratization and in some aspects, some are even more democratic than some Western nations.  Like any state, even the oldest democracies, African states are on the journey of becoming more democratic. Democracy is not an end or event where a given nation crosses a certain line and alas, they are happy-ever-after democratic. No. Democracy is a means. A process. This process will keep on for eternity because human beings who execute this system of political organization are inherently imperfect, and as such will always deal with internal contradictions to their governance. Therefore, by Africa’s democratization most likely coming from China, I imply that there is a high possibility of different African countries tending to democratize more and more through their partnership with China than with other global actors in Africa.

Democracy can be understood in its opposition to other forms of government such as autocracy/dictatorship/tyranny- systems of government in which absolute power is held by the ruler, known as an autocrat/dictator/tyrant, or where power is held by a few individuals. The Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper in his work “The Open Society and Its Enemies”, contrasted democracy to tyranny, and established that unlike under dictatorship, democracy offers opportunities for people to control their rulers, to appoint and disappoint them without the need for a revolution.

For Karl Popper’s idea of democracy enabling people to control their leaders to function, another argument comes into play – that of development leading to democracy. It has also been articulated and criticized as the modernization theory. This theory holds that as societies become economically developed, wealthier and more educated, their political institutions become increasingly liberal democratic. Whereas critics have compromised the modernization theory by accentuating cases where industrialization failed to produce democratization, such as Japan, Germany, and the Soviet Union, and claiming that the theory was too general and overlooked societal differences, this has not fundamentally challenged the fact that economic development significantly predicts democratization. We should note that social science theories are never as accurate as scientific theories. Several arbitrary factors undermine a prediction because societies are very disparate, and are as fluid and changing as the weather. The preponderance of accuracy for a social theory is never better than about 75 percent.

My argument emerges from an observation of the flow of development finance from the West and China, with a focus on what that finance does in Africa. According to a 2018 report by the China-Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), in 2000, China’s annual development finance to Africa totalled US$121 million. It was distributed among a handful of countries. However, by 2013, it had crossed over US$16 billion and was comparable to those of the largest Western development finance providers. China’s development Finance portfolio also focused on infrastructure projects and industries. In Uganda, finance from the Belt and Road Initiative enabled us to construct two hydropower plants; the Isimba Hydro Power Plant which generates 183MW to the national grid and the Karuma Hydro Power Plant which will produce 600MW. This will definitely contribute to our country’s power supply, which is a fundamental ingredient for manufacturing economic development.

However, another revelation from the SAIS’s report was that as China’s development finance portfolio in Africa increased, Western countries focused more on the quality of governance in the developing world and how it relates to economic development. They became keen on corruption controls, democratic development, and respect for human rights and they made their perception of those attributes in Africa an integral part of their countries’ foreign policy agendas. They hypothesized that China’s growing economic and political footprint is undermining the West’s drive to promote good governance in Africa. This is my disagreement with them and the focus of the argument I make about modernization.

Whereas modernization is never linear, evidence stipulates that each stage of modernization changes people’s worldviews. Christian Welzel and Ronald Inglehart, German and American political scientists respectively, in their book “Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence” argue that Industrialization leads to one major process of change, bringing bureaucratization, hierarchy, and centralization of authority, secularization, and a shift from traditional to secular-rational values. Then the rise of postindustrial society introduces another set of cultural changes that move in a different direction: instead of bureaucratization and centralization, the new trend capitalizes on individual autonomy and self-expression values, which increasingly emancipates people from authority. Therefore, other factors being constant, high levels of economic development tend to make people more tolerant and trusting bringing more emphasis on self-expression and participation in decision-making. However, this process is never deterministic. Any forecasts can only be probabilistic since economic factors are not the only influence. They observe that a country’s leaders and nation-specific events could also shape what happens and disclaim their argument thus; modernization’s changes are not irreversible. Severe economic collapse can reverse them, as happened during the Great Depression in Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain and during the 1990s in most of the Soviet successor states. Inglehart and Welzel further argue that modernization does not automatically bring democracy but with time it causes social and cultural changes that make democracy increasingly probable.

Suppose we are to predict which of the foreign actors between China and the West is likely to contribute to the democratization efforts among African nations. In that case, the biggest contributor to our development and modernization efforts is probably China. The West is mistaken and forgetful of their own development experience to assume that lecturing African leaders, sanctioning them and banning countries like Uganda from AGOA for passing anti-homosexuality laws will democratize Africa. It won’t. Supporting us to develop economically will.

The writer is a Lawyer and Research Fellow at the Development Watch Centre.

 

 

 

An African Perspective on the CPC’s Concept of Whole Process People’s Democracy

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By Moshi Israel

The Communist Party of China (CPC) has served the people of China for several decades with utmost effectiveness that should be admired everywhere. The success of the CPC is not a mere fluke, considering the complexity of China’s history and national realities. China with more than a millennium of history has had to endure civil wars and power struggles from different dynasties that exposed the common people to untold suffering. The opium wars and Western colonialism also left the once-great civilization of China on the brink of collapse. The CPC pulled China from the jaws of destruction and put the country on a path to unprecedented prosperity and success.

The People’s Republic of China is a vast country with a huge population and a diversity of cultures and ethnicities. To govern such a country, a certain political acumen and tact is required and the CPC under the leadership of President Xi has proved itself a very capable candidate to map China’s development well into the future.

President Xi introduced the concept of whole process people’s democracy back in 2012 and elaborated it as true democracy that addresses the people’s concerns and is characterised by the people’s participation in all state’s social, cultural, and economic affairs. This type of democracy is ‘whole process’ because the people engage in democratic elections, consultations, management, decision-making, and oversight in accordance with the constitution. On the other hand, it is the people’s democracy because China’s constitution labels the people as masters of the country.

The National People’s Congress (NPC) and the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) work closely with and hold two sessions in which they deliberate on the governance of the state with the people’s interests in consideration. These national bodies collaborate closely with elected grassroots officials to address issues of concern for every citizen. These grassroots committees run from the village, town, and city to the provincial level. Through them, the common person’s concerns are able to reach the highest level of the Chinese government. Moreover, the CPC despite being the dominant party of choice for most Chinese people, still works closely with a number of other political parties in China.

China has demonstrated that whereas every country should aspire to be democratic, the concept of democracy varies from one country to the next depending on their national context. Not every country is suited to the Western style of democracy. Aspects of culture, geography, history, demographics, and economics play a vital role in determining what sort of democracy a country will be. Centuries of the forced and failed Western way of democracy across the world indicate that perhaps everyone cannot be the same and being different is okay. From ancient Greece; the bedrock of democracy to Britain and the United States, democracy has come in different forms for all of these countries.

China, under the CPC, has clearly shown that democracy is not a mere jargon to be thrown around aimlessly, rather, democracy should be practiced and its results seen. China has achieved this by elevating over half of a billion people out of absolute poverty and putting China on a modernization path so effective, it has been dubbed a ‘miracle.’ Furthermore, China’s concept of democracy extends across two fronts; the domestic and the international arenas. Domestically, China has grown exponentially. On the international stage, China has spread the gospel of whole process people’s democracy with a unique Chinese socialism.

China, unlike the West, believes in and practices the concepts of mutual benefit, shared prosperity, and win-win partnerships with its international partners. Through the Belt and Road Initiative, the country has established good relations with others across the world.

African countries, as beneficiaries of China’s growth through the latter’s application of its democratic concepts on the international stage, should proactively seek to develop their own people-centered and development-oriented democratic structures. This should be based on each country’s national realities. Besides, China has always learned from other developed countries and altered these lessons to fit its national context.

Otherwise, the CPC with President Xi Jinping at the helm has produced amazing results by strategically choosing to put the development of Chinese people at the forefront. Rightly so, democracy should indeed be structured around people’s happiness. Elections and a thousand political parties do not mean much if the people are starving and underdeveloped.

Therefore, every Ugandan and every African should be asking their leaders, what sort of democracy they think they are engaging in if the people’s happiness is not a core priority. With China, we can see that political theory should be backed by strategic and patriotic practices centered on common prosperity and the right to development.

The Writer is a Senior Research Fellow at Development Watch Center.

 

Imagine if Assange had exposed Chinese crimes, not U.S ones

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By George Galloway

If Julian Assange were a Chinese journalist and publisher, he’d have the Nobel Prize, be the centerpiece of Human Rights Day, and last week his portrait would’ve been planted atop President Joe Biden’s Democracy Summit.

Assange’s name would’ve been the first on US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s list of 350 journalists under threat, published, without irony, on the day his administration sought to extradite Assange to face 175 years in a supermax prison.

If Chinese crimes rather than American crimes had been revealed by Assange, he would now be the poster boy for the Winter Olympics’ boycott campaign.

Every news bulletin today would’ve led with his fate, every press still turning would be rolling out the outrage at the crushing of this butterfly on the wheel.

Poor Julian, if only he had been born a Chinaman.

His “crime”, though, is that he exposed, inter alia, US war crimes in Iraq, including assassinations and more than 15,000 unreported deaths of civilians; the torture of men and boys aged between 14 and 89, at Guantanamo; the US illegally spying on UN secretary generals and other diplomats; the CIA-insitigated military coup in Honduras in 2009; and the US’ secret war on Yemen in which thousands have been killed.

In bewigged splendour, the High Court in London has just landed a death blow, not only to the fragments, the tatters, of British justice, but they have murdered journalism itself. And, given that the fourth estate, in theory, stands as a sentinel for democracy itself, they have killed the pretence that the UK is a democracy at all. All in the week that self-selecting “democracies” have been masturbating their superiority over others.

The Assange case should have fallen at the first hurdle, never mind the scores of hurdles since. On the very face of the Extradition Treaty between the UK and the US, it is specifically excluded that someone can be extradited from one to the other to face political charges.

Ironically, this was so the US could shield the possibility of Irish Republican fugitives in the United States being extradited to face political charges in Britain. No American President – even Obama – is without a long-lost Irish antecedent. With 30 million Irish American votes at stake, no chances could be taken with politically motivated alleged criminals.

When I personally challenged the then-Home Secretary David Blunkett, who secretly concluded the Treaty, about the possibility of new Nelson Mandelas being sent to face political charges, he personally assured me that no such thing could ever happen.

Assurances now as threadbare as a House of Lords medieval tapestry.

Almost uncountable egregious breaches of due process should have killed the remotest chance of Assange’s extradition. Let me highlight just three.

Once it emerged that the US government had secretly recorded on video every legal meeting between Julian Assange and his able and eminent lawyers over several years, the case should have been thrown out by any self-respecting judge, in any democracy.

Once it emerged that the key witness against Assange was an Icelandic thief, fraudster and convicted paedophilic liar, who moreover now freely admits that his testimony on which the charges are based was a pack of lies, any true judge would have found against the US government.

And once it emerged that the US government had laid careful plans to kidnap Assange in London, and if necessary murder him outside Harrods in the streets around the Ecuadorean Embassy, the value of any US “assurances” about what would happen to Assange reached rock bottom. They could not be relied upon. And extradition could not possibly be countenanced.

However, the printing presses are not rolling for Assange, being quietly killed in Belmarsh prison.

The air-hostess-style Western ‘journalists’ being paid handsomely for their skills at reading autocues are silent as to his fate and the fate of their “profession”. They know that if this is happening to Assange it could happen to them, but, like the arrow that flies in the night, they long ago killed that possibility themselves. There will be no glad confident morning for them. Only servitude and pieces of silver.

And so the American juggernaut once again crushes justice in virtual silence. That’s the thing about breaking a butterfly on the wheel. No one can hear it scream.

George Galloway was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. He presents TV and radio shows. He is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator. Follow him on

This article was first published by RT.

 

It is undemocratic the U.S or any other country to dictate what democracy is

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By Alan Collins Mpewo & Allawi Ssemanda

Since the United States of America emerged as a superpower, it has always presented itself as the beacon of democracy and tried to impose its values on other countries. Critics of the American model of democracy have accused it of forcing and coercing sovereign states into following its principles leaving behind devastating effects as we saw in Iraq, Libya to mention but a few.

In what seems normal to Washington, the U.S has on many occasions gone ahead to use military force to enforce its so-called democracy. While they hide under claims of promoting democracy, going by words of U.S’ founding father, president George Washington, “No nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by interest; and no prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it…unless both [nations’] interests happen to be assimilated.”

Put differently, U.S’ classification of countries, branding some democratic and others undemocratic has nothing to do with Washington’s good wishes to framed countries but rather America’s selfish interests and the need to spread its hegemony which the U.S feels is challenged whenever some countries oppose it. In other words, despite Washington’s claim of kindness, promoting the so-called liberty, civilisation, democracy, human rights or promoting and defending internationals laws and norms, the U.S has always sowed seeds of suffering in all countries it moves to enforce their model of democracy.

Outside Africa, there are many countries where citizens are suffering and sometimes dying due to curable diseases but can’t be treated due to sanctions the U.S impose on such countries Washington accuse of being “undemocratic” or for choosing the model of democracy that fits their countries. Cuba, Venezuela, Iran among others are a few examples. One can ask; of what importance is enforcing of U.S’ model of democracy if it is to bring endless suffering to humanity as noted above?

With the upcoming Biden democracy summit where several countries have been excluded, it is high time the U.S realized that their self-righteous policies don’t work in some cultural background and that these policies have more to do with power than people. We must agree that democracy is not an exclusive patent of Western countries and should not be defined and dictated according to Washington’s desires.

Broadly speaking, democracy is about the people in a given country deciding on how affairs of their countries should be governed. It is never about outsiders deciding how people of a certain sovereign country should be run its internal affairs.  If critically analysed, one can argue former U.S President Abraham Lincoln by defining democracy as government of the people, by the people and for the people, this is arguably what he meant.

The much-praised electoral democracy some Western Capitals sing is not democracy for it squarely climates the ruled from making decisions as the rich or capitalists groups takeover the otherwise all people’s excise.

Put differently, what seems to be solutions promoted by the West as democracy are just models tested in western nations but not in different cultures which ignores other important aspect such as different cultures. This explains why most governments set up by the West have always failed to stand the test of the time. Even without going to “Cambridge”, one can tell this failure is due to imposing a different culture on people without their input. It means while it is good to help, the one you claim to help should have asked for your assistance in first place!

With that in mind, it is probably the right time the West particularly the U.S considered China’s proposed concept of the “whole-process people’s democracy.” If well analysed, “whole-process people’s democracy” is the ideal one for it takes into account societal differences other than assuming everything is the same as seen in West’s democracy model which citizens now disapprove as seen in recent polling with the latest being America’s ABC poll which indicated 57% of global respondents and 72% of American citizens don’t approve U.S’ example of democracy. Surprisingly China which Biden conveniently snubbed, a study by a sociology professor at York University (Canada) found that 98% of Chinese believe in their government. The question is where does one get moral audacity to disprove a sovereign country’s leadership when overwhelming majority of citizens are contented with it? I think it is speaking against such voices that should be branded undemocratic!

With such, Washington should rethink of their much-praised “democracy” and stop branding other countries’ government as autocratic or rogue simply because they don’t agree with their now failing liberal democracy.  The west can as well learn from such polling’s that trying to impose their beliefs onto others and claiming they alone know what is right is not being liberal but rather intolerant. It is not a surprise that intolerant white supremacists’ movements in the U.S are on rise including openly funding politicians. As Washington gears up for president Biden’s democracy submit, maybe his handlers should ask him if he is not bothered about growing influence of white supremacists in U.S’ “electoral democracy” which according Human Rights Watch, over 58 American organizations noted in a letter to Attorney General undermine principles of democracy.

Alan Collins Mpewo is a lawyer and Research Fellow at Development Watch Centre and Allawi Ssemanda, Executive Director Development Watch Centre, a Foreign Policy Think Tank.

 

 

Global Democracy has a Very Bad Year.

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Report by The Economist

Global democracy continued its decline in 2020, according to the latest edition of the Democracy Index from our sister company, The Economist Intelligence Unit. The annual survey, which rates the state of democracy across 167 countries based on five measures—electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties—finds that just 8.4% of the world’s population live in a full democracy while more than a third live under authoritarian rule. The global score of 5.37 out of ten is the lowest recorded since the index began in 2006.

Government-imposed lockdowns and other pandemic-control measures led to a huge rollback of civil liberties in 2020, causing downgrades across the majority of countries. Confronted by a new, deadly disease to which humans had no natural immunity, most people concluded that preventing a catastrophic loss of life justified some temporary loss of freedom. The ranking penalised countries that withdrew civil liberties, failed to allow proper scrutiny of emergency powers or denied freedom of expression—regardless of whether there was public support for government measures. In France for example, severe lockdowns and national curfews led to a small but significant decrease in its overall score and the country dropped into the “flawed democracy” category.

The pandemic did not put a stop to rising levels of political engagement. Turnout in the American presidential election in November was the highest for 120 years and the country recorded its best political participation score since the index began. But public trust in the democratic process was dealt a blow by the refusal of Donald Trump and many of his supporters to accept the election result, and the United States remains in the “flawed democracy” category.

The star performer, measured by the change in both its score and rank, was Taiwan, which was upgraded to a “full democracy” after rising 20 places in the global ranking from 31st to 11th. Taiwan went to the polls in January 2020, and a strong voter turnout, including among young people, demonstrated the resilience of its democracy.

Elections do not always lead to democratic progress. Although Mali held parliamentary elections in March 2020 that were broadly free and fair, the results were nullified when the country suffered a coup in August by military officers aggrieved by a lack of progress against jihadist insurgents. Mali’s drop of 11 places down the rankings is typical of sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, which suffered a terrible year for democracy.

This year is not off to a promising start, with an insurrection in America’s Capitol and a military coup in Myanmar. Democrats will hope that a gradual loosening of covid-19 restrictions will give them more reason to cheer.

To read full report by The Economist Intelligence Unit, click here.

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