Chinese Democracy that Solves Public Matters Through Consultation
當代中國與世界研究院特約研究員，復旦大學中國研究院研究員、副院長范勇鵬
By FAN Yongpeng, Special Research Fellow at the Academy of Contemporary China and World Studies, Research Fellow and Deputy Dean of the China Institute, Fudan University
A key item on the agenda of this year’s Two Sessions as a major political event in China is to deliberate the amendment to the Legislation Law of the People’s Republic of China and thus incorporate “upholding and developing the whole-process people’s democracy” into the Law.
As to “Chinese modernization”, the term was put forward at the 20th CPC National Congress. Among the four fundamental features of Chinese modernization, the first one is that “it is the modernization of a huge population”. As President Xi Jinping once put it, Chinese modernization implies a unique democracy – the whole-process people’s democracy. To fully appreciate this concept, it is important to understand what such a huge population means for China.
The word democracy originated in ancient Greece. There are some historical laws as to what kind of system suits which countries. Democracy in its classic definition always appeared in tiny city-states. It had two basic characteristics: (1) all citizens could participate in state governance directly, and (2) the opinions of the majority shall prevail. There was no representative system back then, so election was not the primary institutional form. Instead, a lottery system was adopted both in the city-states of ancient Greece and Italy’s small republics in the Middle Ages. In all those democratic states, however, democracy was just a privilege reserved for a handful of citizens, whereas the majority of the people were either slaves or plebeians with no political rights. It was by no means the kind of democracy that ordinary laborers would want.
A major problem with this kind of small democracies is their poor viability, which is why their democratic systems all failed after a short period of practice. From ancient Greek philosophers to modern Enlightenment thinkers in Europe, it was generally believed that democracy was impossible in big states, hence a bad system. In fact, since the end of the Middle Ages, most European states have evolved toward the centralization of power, a phenomenon shared by all civilizations worldwide.
But two special situations in Europe must be noted. One is that the continent stagnated in the stage of feudal system for a long time before entering the modern times, during which it was somewhat similar to the Western Zhou Dynasty in Chinese history, but of a less developed institutional level. It was from the feudal aristocracy that the parliamentary system and the election system stemmed. Chang Tai-yen, a democratic revolutionary and thinker in the late Qing Dynasty, called the parliamentary system a variation of feudalism. Similar systems existed in China in ancient times, but they were abandoned after the Qin and Han Dynasties as the Chinese pursued national unity in the belief that the world belonged to all. The other is that Europe is where capitalist modernization began. Capitalism is a system of private rights based on private ownership. Feudalism is a system of private rights too. The two systems therefore have much in common. As a result, when the emerging capitalist class tried to control state power, they could easily inherit and develop the feudal legacy and create the modern representative system, which has later evolved into the so-called representative democracy that we see in the West today.
The representative system has solved the dilemma of small-scale democracy. When a state grows bigger, emerging aristocrats and capitalists can elect their representatives to form a parliament, while they themselves can be the true power holders behind the scenes. According to Marx, the so-called democracy of the capitalist class was “to decide once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament”. This is called “master choosing” by Professor Wang Shaoguang. In other words, the people could nominally vote to elect some people to be their masters, and then they would have nothing to do with the regime anymore.
中國能不能采取這種制度呢？肯定是不行，我認為有兩方面原因。
Is it possible to transplant this kind of system to China? The answer is negative for two reasons.
First of all, the Chinese culture puts the people first. Unlike civilizations that put God or capital first, the Chinese civilization has always put the people first since time immemorial. From legendary rulers Yao and Shun to Zhou Gong, the founding father of Western Zhou, from philosophers Confucius and Mencius to the revolutionary pioneer and leader Sun Yat-sen, Chinese people have never ceased their pursuit for a people-centric world for all. In fact, China is the only country in the world that has truly achieved this goal – the Party is committed to serving public good and exercising power for the people.
其次，中國規模巨大，廣土眾民。
Second, China has too vast a territory and too huge a population.
It would be perfectly practical in a small country to decide something through the consultation of all people because, for one thing, political matters in such a country are not so complicated as to have trouble from such extensive consultation. For another, the interests, opinions and cultures in such a country are not so complicated as to contain the risk of social splits, and state politics are not likely to be kidnapped by a certain vested interest group.
Western countries today are much larger than the democratic city-states of the past. They have bound the small democracies together through representative system, federal system and the like, an expansion that has both pros – maintaining the democratic elements – and cons – magnifying the drawbacks of small democracies. For instance, the elected representatives only represent the interests of their respective electoral districts, leading to the chronic social ill of provincialism. The lobbying and gaming among various interest groups during legislation and decision making have turned the exercise of political power into a dirty game of spoils. Capitalists and elites can always form a political party or NGO and are adept at taking advantage of the law in their favor, whereas those unable to join the game never receive any attention. Different parties are engaged in mutual opposition and mud-slinging without good reason. In sum, with the Western concept of democracy, political parties are too narrow-minded and self-interested to heed public good or the big picture.
China is a large country since ancient times with rich experience in institution. It is extremely challenging for a large country to maintain unity and stability and safeguard integrity and common interests. In the Book of History, there is a chapter called “Hong Fan”, which means the law of governance. It tells the story of Emperor Wu of the Zhou Dynasty, after vanquishing the Shang Dynasty, asking the vanquished emperor’s uncle Ji Zi for advice on how to run a country. The article says, one must be impartial and just in governance, should not act like a tyrant out of selfish motives, and should object to anyone forming a clique to pursue selfish interests. As the old saying goes, “a state will be well governed when there is no partiality or clique”.
Yet it is difficult to see the people truly become the masters of a large country. Despite its initiation of the idea that “the people are the foundation of a state” and the emphasis that “the people are more valuable than the emperor”, China never really achieved that until modern times. This is because the huge population presents a major hurdle on the way from “people first” to “democracy”.
It is the CPC that has finally removed this hurdle. Professor Zhang Weiwei called the CPC “a party representing the common interests of all”, which is different from the Western parties that represent partial or local interests. The CPC is the vanguard of the Chinese people. It leads the country on behalf of the greatest possible majority of the Chinese people. As President Xi Jinping said, the CPC doesn’t “represent any interest group, establishment group, or privileged social group”. This description is a continuation of the principle of governance that has been upheld for 3,000 years in the country.
It is easy, against such a background, to understand what whole-process people’s democracy means. With a population of 1.4 billion, China obviously cannot adopt the Western representative democracy featuring intermittent elections and the game of special interests. What it needs is a whole-process democracy that covers all areas, all links and all levels of political life. Be it the daily routines in villages or neighborly trivialities, or state legislation, administration and development strategies, everything concerning the people is done through the consultation of all people.
Compared with rushing anything to a vote, China places more stress on reaching a consensus. Whether within primary-level Party organizations or for legislation at the NPC, there would be full and extensive consultation before members vote for a decision, so that those of different opinions could find more common ground and meet each other halfway, and an overwhelming consensus could be reached rather than simply overriding the minority. The American type of democracy – to pass a bill at the Congress or to elect a president by having one more vote – is not what China wants.
Most important of all, the Chinese democracy should always be under the leadership of the CPC. In China, a country of extremely diversified cultures, extremely complicated interests, and highly uneven development, the CPC is the only Party that can make sure the people’s representatives elected in each place can serve as NPC deputies, can converge the interests of various regions, industries and ethnic groups into the overall interests of the Chinese nation, and can harmonize unity with diversity. That is the essential superiority of the whole-process people’s democracy. That is the fundamental reason why Chinese democracy is for the whole process and the whole people.
