COMMENT China ready for democracy
in 1940s, not today By Li
YongYan
BEIJING - You have to feel sorry for the
Chinese, because they are just not ready for some of the
good things in life. But don't say that directly unless
you want to make enemies of 1.3 billion people. However,
if they tell you that they are not yet ready for some
beautiful and advanced things, the proper thing is to
nod emphatically, or even applaud if you happen to be
Chinese. For they will get angry if you beg to differ.
Forget that Mao Zedong famously once said: "The Chinese
people have the determination and ability to stand tall
and proud among the nations of the world."
It
doesn't matter that from ships to chips, from water dams
to dot coms, China is striding fast and furious toward
modernization. It is nothing that to date no less than
eight Chinese have won the Nobel Prize, from physics to
peace to literature, and another brave Chinese has
rocketed into outer space.
Still, there is
something, however desirable, that is simply beyond the
reach of the great Chinese people. This "something" may
not be as complicated as lunar exploration or as
high-tech as splitting the nucleus of an atom. It
requires no more than signing one's own name, after
ticking somebody else's name, on a piece of paper. Yes.
That is called casting a vote, a ballot, a cutting-edge
attainment beyond the capabilities of the Chinese, or so
the Beijing government says.
In an interview in
September 2000 with CBS' Mike Wallace, China's
then-president Jiang Zemin explained why Chinese people
can't be allowed to have universal suffrage at this
time: "The quality of our people is too low." There, in
a simple statement, the people - supposed masters of the
country - were deemed not fit for democracy, because
once the ignorant, the unqualified, acquire the right to
choose their government, "chaos will ensue," Jiang
predicted. So the people are too stupid to know what is
good for them. Only Papa, the Communist Party of China,
knows best.
Now this is a new theory -
educational discrimination democracy. Let's not
undertake a discourse of the God-given, inalienable,
egalitarian nature of a citizen's civil rights - trust
the papas in Beijing to know all that. But for anyone
who is learned enough to remember a little history, the
Communist Party of China (CPC) extolled with great
fanfare the democratic process in the 1940s in war-torn
rural areas where illiterate peasants were electing
their village leaders, under the auspices of the CPC.
How? By dropping a white bean in a bowl behind the
candidates they liked, and a black-eyed pea behind the
ones they didn't trust. The beans were then tallied by
the color and a winner was announced. Simple, effective
and education-blind.
More than half a century has
passed, and one would think the literacy rate has gone
up so much that beans are no longer necessary. But
according to the leadership in China, the people still
are not literate, or sensible enough to grapple with
democracy - forget the greatly touted achievements in
everything from dramatically reduced infant mortality to
dramatically increased education to dramatically
launching satellites into space. A perverse thing then
happens: the unwashed masses now are to blame for the
lack of popular elections and direct suffrage when the
government has failed to teach them how to write their
names, three characters at most, for well over 50 years.
(According to the national census in 2000, the
illiteracy rate on the Chinese mainland dropped from
15.88 percent in 1990 to 6.72 in 2002. No urban-rural
breakdown was provided).
Chinese democracy
once again in vogue - in name In fact, democracy
only recently has become a desirable goal for Beijing -
in name. Until a few years ago, there were two types of
democracy in the People's Daily: ours and theirs. Our
"socialist" democracy is more democratic than their
"Western" brand. People living under socialism enjoy the
widest, the greatest, the most profound freedoms because
they are the masters of the country, while capitalist
governments in the West are cheat, exploit and otherwise
suppress their poor people under the guise of universal
suffrage, free press and free speech. Publicizing
scandals like "Zippergate" does not show the openness of
the American system, but rather illustrates one group of
capitalist dogs eating another. Public declaration of a
president's and a presidential candidate's household
income is another ploy to deceive the
people.
Gradually, the Beijing propaganda machine
stopped churning out these educational sound bites,
especially since more and more "masters" are demanding
to "be deceived likewise", for once, by their own
"servants" in Beijing. Yet, electoral rights are still
out of the question. So the new theory of educational
discrimination is born.
But wait. Here are
editorial comments from a major, official Chinese
newspaper lambasting the educational discrimination
theory - and supporting universal suffrage - like a
precision bomb:
"The election right is among the
very minimum political rights to which the people in a
democratic country are entitled. The people are the
masters, officials their servants. If the people have no
such right, then the country is anything but a democracy
... Ever since World War I, the world is unambiguously,
inevitably moving toward universal suffrage."
And this: "Is it right to refuse to hold popular
elections just because the literacy rate among the
people is low? This is a long standing issue: some
people who are opposed to democracy use this as an
excuse to delay the implementation of democracy so that
they can continue their rule. Isn't the ulterior motive
obvious?"
These passages are not from a
right-leaning Hong Kong or Taiwan newspaper written
after China announced last month that early universal
suffrage would not be permitted in Hong Kong in 2007 for
the chief executive or in 2008 for its legislature. No.
They are straight out of the Xinhua Daily newspaper, the
Communist Party of China's very own mouthpiece, dated -
surprise - February 2, 1944, and January 24, 1946,
respectively. The old Xinhua Daily is not related to the
current official Xinhua news agency.
Yes. They
come from the mid-1940s, when the communists were
fighting for democracy against the ruling
Kuomintang (KMT) government.
These articles do
not exist in an online archive, and they cannot be read
without official permission from the Communist Party of
China; though excerpts do appear online on forums and
message boards. All the excerpts here can be found in a
book, a compilation of official editorials, Heralds
of History - Solemn Promises Over Half a Century
Ago, Shantou University Press, Guangdong province,
September 1999. The book, which was promptly banned on
the mainland, was compiled by Xiao Shu (a pen name), who
occasionally writes for mainland newspapers. Some of the
articles from the book, and all of those quoted
here, can be read in their Chinese
form by clicking here.
Grassroots
democracy helped communists in the 1940s At the
time these editorials were written, the communists were
trying to gain some breathing room through military
campaigns and political efforts to legitimize the party.
They did this by demanding democracy - the fuller and
the quicker the democracy, the better it was for them.
So the party's newspaper mouthpieces, the Xinhua Daily
and the Liberation Daily, were extolling democracy at
the grassroots level.
The Xinhua Daily was the
Communist Party of China's official print newspaper,
founded on January 11, 1938, in Wuhan, the capital of
Hubei province. At that time, the Japanese aggression
forced an uneasy alliance between the ruling KMT
government and the renegade communists. In October of
that year, the advance of the Japanese army compelled
the news staff to retreat to the war capital in
Chongqing, Sichuan province, where the Xinhua Daily was
then published. The paper was shut down by the
government on February 28, 1947, as the civil war
escalated.
Given these earlier, passionate calls
for universal suffrage, and given the advancement of the
Chinese people, it is bewildering to hear senior party
and government officials today say the time is not right
for democracy, the people are not ready, the specific
conditions do not exist to permit hasty voting; the
process today must be gradual. It was different for
those illiterate peasants in their wretched villages -
democracy was the right thing at the right time for
them.
It is sad to see that the Chinese today,
while gaining a better education, knowledge, skills and
sophistication, have actually slipped into the abyss of
ignorance and incompetence over the past 60 years,
further lagging behind those who are worthy to enter the
halls of modern democracy. Even dropping beans into pots
and then counting them is too much math for them
now.
But there is still a glimmer of hope in Hong
Kong. Surely, the 6 million people of Hong Kong, with a
per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of well over
US$24,000, the third highest in the world, have attained
sufficient education and sophistication and have finally
achieved quality high enough to be deserving of
universal elections. Well, perhaps. But the rules have
changed. This time, according to the recently announced
interpretation of the Basic Law (Hong Kong's
constitution covering 50 years, from 1997 when it was
handed back to China by the British), the Hong Kong
Special Administrative Region is still not ready for
direct elections of its chief executive and legislative
council. The truth is that Beijing thinks many Hong Kong
people are not "patriotic" enough to run the island.
Of course. We Chinese are never good enough, one
way or another.
In conclusion, let us consider
another editorial exhortation from the Xinhua Daily
mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China: "How is
democracy possible without ending one-party rule,
without popular suffrage? Return the people's rights to
the people!" - September 27, 1945.
And even
earlier:
"They [those who oppose the CPC] think
the implementation of democracy in China is a matter not
for today, but a number of years later. They want to
practice democracy only after the Chinese people are as
knowledgeable and educated as in democracies in Europe
and America ... But it is under a democratic system that
a better education and training will be available to the
people." - February 24, 1939.
Li
YongYan is an analyst of Chinese business.
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