Many countries include ‘Democratic’ or ‘People’s’ in their names, even though they are not democratic and do not serve their people. Examples: Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Lao People’s Democratic Republic People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria Democratic Republic of the Congo And German Democratic Republic (East Side) in 1949–1990. None of these states are democratic, power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of a small ruling elite. Who are they fooling with these names?
I’m Chinese. There is a difference between what Chinese people call democracy and what traditional Western political philosophy calls democracy.
In China, democracy (民主) means government which works for the benefit of the people.
As it is defined in Western political philosophy, democracy means that the people can control the composition and decisions of their government.
This means that a benevolent dictatorship which furthers the interest of the people qualifies as democratic under the Chinese definition, even though it obviously wouldn’t in the Western definition. Conversely, a government which works only for the upper class and a select elite isn’t democratic under the Chinese definition, but it could be under the Western one as long as it had free and fair elections.
Nowhere is this clash in definitions more apparent than in Hong Kong. For one, the city has had a taste of democracy in the Western sense through the limited elections it had during British colonial rule. On the other hand, China doesn’t see free and fair elections as particularly necessary to achieve its vision of democracy. The government is democratic as long as it does what the people want, in the view of Chinese political thought. Of course, the Western-educated Hongkongers would beg to differ.
This is just a sidenote, but the Communist Party is extremely popular in China. I believe that even if they opened the elections to people of any party and then contested them under a 100% fair electoral system with no voter suppression, nor use of security forces to intimidate opposition, I think the Communists would still win in a landslide if elections were held next month.
Under economic prosperity. I wonder if the same will be true when the one party starts making bad decisions.
Getting a bit off-topic, but I also wanted to take the time here to talk about the mandate of heaven (天命), an old concept of Chinese political philosophy. I think it’s a good precursor to the modern Chinese understanding of democracy and the legitimacy of governments.
The mandate of heaven is a concept that was invented to explain why imperial dynasties rise and fall. It essentially states that a dynasty has divine favour and a mandate to rule if it rules in a manner that is fair and just, and benefits the people. When a dynasty becomes corrupt and unjust in its rule, the mandate of heaven will be withdrawn and the people will revolt against it, and a new dynasty will rise up and replace it.
The concept is inherently steeped in traditional Chinese religious practices and beliefs which mostly are no longer relevant today. But I think that the mandate of heaven is nothing more than a religious way of spelling out the concept of popular sovereignty. When a dynasty rules for the benefit of the people, it enjoys the mandate from heaven. In modern political thought, we understand that a government instead derives from the people directly. But other than that, it’s the same thing.
The Communist Party claimed its mandate during the Chinese Civil War when it overthrew the old dynasty (Chiang Kai-Shek) and established a new one (Mao Zedong). And as long as it continues to enjoy popular support, it has that mandate to rule. I do note that notwithstanding all of this text, both men would have found it insulting to be referred to as the leaders of a dynasty. But what was then called a dynasty is now called a republic. The fact that the post of chief of state, be it emperor, president, or general secretary, is no longer hereditary, has no bearing on the fundamental nature of it.
Maybe people in China would know the true definition of democracy if their “benevolent” government didn’t block Wikipedia.
Chinese people know what Westerners call democracy. And they know it’s not exactly the same as what they call “民主”. But they don’t have a word for it. Just like English doesn’t really have a word to describe what Chinese people call “民主”. I think it’s unfair to translate that term as “democracy”, as someone who speaks both Standard Mandarin Chinese and English, though neither are technically my native tongue.
If I were to coin a new term to describe it, the best I could do is “benevolent government”. But then people just accuse me of Orientalism.
And I do mean it when I say that Chinese people truly believe (whether that is a product of propaganda or not is a topic of a different discussion) that their system is superior to Western liberal democracy. For what it’s worth, I don’t agree. Living in a country that practices Western democracy doesn’t prevent people from voting in a government that does what they want, as the Communist Party reportedly does. But it does give you a choice in the event that it goes sour. And the Chinese people, as it currently stands, are kind of just relying on the Party to keep doing things that are good and popular. That’s not guaranteed to always be the case, and they can’t really do anything about it if it stops being that way.
You have a very good and friendly way of explaining these things.
Can you explain what those ideograms literally mean and the etymology of the word they then construct? I’m assuming it probably is “Dragon burninating the countryside” combined with “Dragon burninating all the peoples” with the characters for “bootlicker, s is for sucks and consummate V’s” but I am not an expert.
Well, that’s some blatant racism. Fascinating that Lemmy is a refuge for that. Political opponents of China, clean up your yard!
民主 comes from Classical Chinese, where it originally meant “ruler” (of a people). It was repurposed I believe in the late Qing or early republican era to mean “democracy”.
民 means “people”, i.e. the population, the public. 主 means “host”, “owner”, or “master”. So while 民主 originally combined those to mean one who was the master of the people, it now is interpreted to mean the state of affairs where the people are the masters.
There is a related term, 民權, “popular sovereignty”, and also sometimes is translated to “democracy”, but it has a subtly different meaning than 民主. It comes from 民 (“people”, as before) and 權 (“power”, “right”, “authority”). Wiktionary doesn’t have the etymology, but I’m guessing it’s possibly a calque of Ancient Greek δημοκρατία (δῆμος, “people” + κράτος, “power”), possibly through one of the many European language words for democracy which derive from that, done during the late Imperial era, which is when many modern Chinese political terms were coined.