Free Pages: EN – LARRY ROMANOFF – Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion – Chapter 16

China is different in having a one-party government, which Americans consider a religious heresy, but the system has enormous advantages. Here, there is no forced separation of officials on the basis of political ideology. China’s entire social spectrum is represented in government in the same way as in Chinese or any other society. There is no partisan in-fighting. Unlike the West, China’s system looks for consensus rather than conflict. Government decision-making is not a sport where my team has to win. It is simply a group of people with various viewpoints working together to obtain a consensus for policy and action for the overall good of their nation. China’s one-party system is superior in virtually all respects to what we have in the West, and how can it be otherwise when the nation’s government officials don’t waste their time fighting juvenile ideological battles with opposition parties.

One of the greatest deciding factors permitting China’s rise is the lack of a belligerent political environment due to the absence of multi-party politics. China’s one-party government is in for the long term; it makes no short-term decisions for the sake of political expediency. China makes decisions for the good of the whole country and, having made them, implements them. There is no partisanship, there are no lobbyists or special interest groups with the power to skew important decisions and rob the population of what it might have had. The benefits of this system can be seen in its results. China has already far surpassed the undeveloped nations that adopted Western democratic governments, and likely has a brighter future than most of them. Why is the West so eager for China to abandon a centuries-old system that clearly works well, in favor of one designed for ideological battles, conflicts and shouting wars?

China’s one-party system is the only thing saving it from destruction, and China needs to stop apologising for it. It is precisely due to China’s so-called “authoritarian” system that only the smartest and most competent can get into leadership positions. It is due only to China’s one-party system that 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty and that China’s GDP has increased by 1700%, a feat never achieved in history by any so-called democracy. And while I don’t want to be unkind, if you’re Chinese, how do you imagine that your “democratic participation” would have improved the above results? My advice is to be grateful for what you have, because you really don’t know how lucky you are.

China’s government leaders manage by consensus, not by power, authority or bullying. It is their job to create agreement and unified willing participation in the country’s policies to meet its goals. At this level there are no children, and there is no one person with the power to start a war just because he doesn’t like someone, or who is free to alienate other nations on the basis of some blind personal ideology. In China, many people and industries are permitted to present their case, but private or short-term interests will not emerge victorious in this system. Your proposals will receive support and will succeed only if they are to the long-term benefit of the country as a whole – the greatest good for the nation and for the population. In the US system, corporations control the government; in China’s, the government controls the corporations. And those firms may often not get their way even if they are government-owned. On the introduction of HSR (High-Speed Rail) in China, some Chinese airlines (especially the state-owned ones) complained like hell, and with good reason, because many had to dramatically scale back their flight schedules since many people prefer the train. But the wide HSR network was seen as being in the best interests of the entire country and it went ahead. That is also why China has by far the best, and the least expensive, mobile phone system in the world.

One American was trying to convince some of my Chinese friends of the great benefits of the uninformed selecting the incompetent, claiming that American-style democracy “gives you more choices”. Choices of what? He was equating the task of selecting the senior management of one of the largest and most important countries in the world, with buying shampoo in the supermarket. “I can give you more choices.” The many senior officials of China’s government are the only people who truly and completely understand the challenges China faces, both from within and from without, and who know the kind and quality of people needed to guide the nation. They are the only people who are competent to evaluate and judge those who are best suited to lead China through the next decades. Nobody outside of those central departments knows how to identify and select those who are capable of leading and protecting China. China today has leaders with a competence unmatched anywhere in the world, men and women who have devoted their lives to the difficult magic of making China a first-world country in only one or two generations, bringing this wonderful country to the international prominence it once had and will have again. And too many Americans, including all of the US government, would like very much to prevent this from happening because it is a challenge to their worldwide domination.

In October of 2013, Qiushi published one of the most excellent and intelligent articles I have ever read on the subject of democracy and multi-party politics. I do not know the name of the author, but he is a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, in the School of International Relations and Public Affairs. He wrote that:

The ‘benchmark for appraising democracy‘ is determined entirely by a small handful of countries who had “a contingent of campaigners paid by various foundations to go around the world delivering speeches and selling the case for democracy. Thus, democracy, together with the social sciences founded on its basis, is more like a propaganda tool employed by the West than anything else, and the resulting knowledge bubble is far from small. Under the Western-style appraisal mechanisms of democracy, there is only one precondition that needs to be met for a developing country to be considered a “democracy”, or to “graduate” from the class of authoritarian countries: that country must show obedience to Western countries, and must give up its independent foreign and domestic policies. Any country that does so is immediately rewarded with “international” praise”.

He also cautioned Chinese, as I strongly do myself, to stop apologising for China’s system of government because it is in fact one of the best in the world. And the Americans don’t have to like it.

The Americans fill their media with articles on China’s government system, often posing disingenuous but supposedly-thoughtful questions like “What will democracy add to China’s efficiency?” This is clever propaganda since the question stakes out in advance the position that a multi-party system is naturally superior and more efficient, thereby framing our discussion and limiting it to a useless opinion-based debate. The simple truth, available to anyone who looks, is that China’s one-party system is almost infinitely more efficient and responsive than any Western model, and even a partial attempt to emulate the Western system, especially the American one, would automatically restrict further progress in China, and would likely work to eliminate the gains already made. To my mind, the most serious mistake the Chinese people can make is to attribute even a shred of credibility to claims of superiority or benefit in a multi-party political system. Rather than feelings of inferiority, the Chinese should be taking pride in their country’s political framework and stop apologising for its grand success.

Again, we need only look at the results to realise the truth of this. No nation in the history of the world has achieved China’s stunning level of progress and development, the credit for which goes in large part to China’s government system and its selection and training of leaders. It’s true the system must adapt to eliminate flaws but the basic framework is unassailable. It isn’t China that shut down half its government for lack of funding. It isn’t China where 30% of the population lost their homes to a fraudulent scheme by its bankers. It isn’t China where millions of educated jobless and homeless are sleeping in tent cities or in the sewers under Las Vegas, and where fully 25% of the people are living below the poverty line and dependent on government assistance for food. It isn’t China where 70% of parents believe their childrens’ lives will be worse than their own, nor is it China where the people have lost all hope for a better future. These distressing conditions, and many more, are all in America and credit for them must be given entirely to the corrupt and dysfunctional multi-party democratic system that Americans have been taught to venerate while it bleeds them dry.

Many foreign observers are now (finally) admitting openly that China’s form of government exhibits multiple signs of superiority over Western systems, and that it is largely responsible for China’s efficiency, for its rapid development, and for its speed of response in areas like the Sichuan earthquake and the planning and deployment of its high-speed train system. The West could learn a lot from China’s government system. It works, beautifully. It has transformed the economy, brought hundreds of millions out of poverty and caused incomes to triple or more in the past ten years alone. It has put men into space, built the world’s fastest trains, the longest undersea tunnels, the world’s longest bridges, the largest dams. It has produced a growth rate of over 10% per year for 30 years, compared to perhaps 3% in the West. Americans love to disparage China’s government as authoritarian, but this “authoritarian” government has almost entirely eliminated illiteracy, liberated Chinese women and extended life expectancy for all from 41 years in 1950 to 76 and still rising today. It has created an educational system that has few apologies to make, and its social welfare system will soon be the envy of many nations. It is rapidly creating the world’s largest genuine middle class. And it’s hardly begun.

16.2. The Chinese are not Interested in “Politics”

In any Western country, political discussions often become emotionally-heated rather quickly, since most everyone has an opinion and many hold those opinions very strongly. The only surprise is that the violent emotions don’t lead more often to physical violence. However, since China hasn’t politics but only government, the discussions are normally muted. Not everyone has an opinion, few of those opinions inspire emotion, and debates are most often rational. Moreover, these debates seldom occur, since few people in any population are sufficiently knowledgeable to intelligently discuss the operations of a national government. And even fewer are interested, unless the government appears to be functioning badly. Most people in China will freely confess that they lack the knowledge of government, primarily because it is outside their field of study and employment, and they have no illusions about their ability to affect their national or local governments in a positive way. They “participate” only if something actually goes wrong. And, sometimes things, at least at the local level, do go wrong, and then the “participation” is quite loud. And, in each such case, if the local authorities fail to act quickly, the national government will step in and force a rectification. In China, “mistakes” by a government are seldom allowed to persist, and they often have prison sentences attached to them.

It is always a shock to Westerners, especially Americans, that some countries don’t permit ‘the people’ to meddle in government unless they have serious credentials and know what they’re doing. In a recent NYT article, it was reflected that Chinese typically believe that peasants (small-town Americans) “are too unschooled to intelligently select the nation’s leaders“. I don’t see how we can avoid the conclusion that they have it right.

Few educated Chinese see the Western multi-party democratic model as particularly appealing because they don’t equate politics with government – as Westerners do – nor do they see sanity in the selection of national leaders as a team sport. The Chinese see the West as having a system where anyone, even a person with no education, training, knowledge, experience, ability – or even intelligence – can rise to become the President or Prime Minister, and where high government office requires no credentials other than popularity. They look on this with an interesting mixture of disbelief and disdain. They are also aware that a multi-party system requires the forcible division of a society into ideologically different groups with violently opposing interests. China has made no such social divisions, and the culture would mitigate against them since they would of necessity lead to conflict and biased ideological agendas, disregarding the good of the country as a whole. Divisions of this kind are anathema to the Chinese, as they should be to us Westerners. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the number of Chinese citizens interested in the US-style of multi-party democracy is about the same as the number of Americans interested in communism.

By contrast, Westerners often observe that the Chinese are apolitical or even apathetic, having no interest in politics. This is true, but it reflects a fundamental ignorance since China neither has nor wants “politics“, and treats government as “government“. The Chinese see government as an occupation, a career like any other. They do not view government through the chromatic and otherwise distorted political team-sport lens as Westerners do. Some people in every country may be attracted or tempted by the prospect of a powerful position in government or industry, but this tends to be a small minority. Most Chinese, as probably most people in every country, want stability and a chance to improve their lives. So long as the government is able to create an environment that offers hope and a stable platform for improvement, they have little interest in the functioning of the government and are happy to leave it to those who are in charge.

16.3. Not Many Chinese are Interested in Government, Either

The Chinese people have a much more mature and realistic attitude toward government than do people in the West, in that they look at government as government, not through the primitive psychological mask of party politics. And when they look at government, they do not delude themselves into believing that running a country is as simple as ordinary Western people think it is. They are aware that a government position necessarily means the assumption of great responsibility. They know it requires a high level of expertise to understand and deal with issues of social policy, population, international trade and finance, the national and international economy, the nation’s industrial policy, foreign policy, military matters, border disputes, friction with US imperialism, and dozens more major and serious topics. And, in the end, most Chinese don’t feel they have the knowledge or experience to affect the course of their country in any positive way – and of course they are correct. They recognise that their government officials have committed their lives to education and training, to acquire the knowledge and skills to manage and lead a country and a society, and they are justifiably aware of their own personal shortcomings. In China, a government career is a commitment requiring one’s full participation, but those not in the professional fields of national governance are not encouraged to do so because they are likely to be uninformed. We cannot argue that this is wrong, and it does seem a more intelligent and realistic way of thinking about government.

16.4. Foreign Resentment of China’s One-Party Government

The reason the Americans and the European Jewish mafia hate China’s one-party system is not because it’s a bad system, but because it cannot be controlled by external forces. China’s one-party system is a perfect form of government, as is obvious by the results it has produced, but the Americans and the Jews cannot get their fingers into it. If China has no political parties and no public elections, how can I buy the candidates? And if I cannot buy the candidates, how can I control the government?

These people are willing to spend huge sums of money to buy control of China’s government and then have the power to influence all its policies, to initiate legislation and to slowly take control of the government. But in China, I can do nothing. The selection of China’s leaders is done quietly, in private. I don’t even know how the system works, and if I don’t understand the system, I cannot manipulate it. That’s why the Americans scream so loudly about China needing more “transparency” in its leadership selection. Why should they care how China chooses its leaders? It’s none of their business. China doesn’t criticise the way Americans choose their leaders. The Americans propose their “transparency” in moral terms, as if China were committing a sin by not being more “open”, but the issue is that they need to understand how it works so they can try to figure out a way to manipulate it. The truth is that China’s one-party government is the main armor preventing the country from being destroyed by the Westerners one more time.

The Americans, and their European banker puppet-masters, know perfectly well that China’s leaders understand their intent and will never cooperate, so the American propaganda machine turns to the Chinese people. “You need democracy. You need multi-party politics. You deserve to have ‘choices’, because selecting a President is the same as buying shampoo in a supermarket. You should be like us, with the ‘freedom’ to choose your shampoo. Trust us. Have a revolution and overthrow your government. That’s what God wants you to do.”

It should be noted here that the Americans, as a fundamental part of their incessant interference in China’s internal affairs, make great effort to cultivate attitudes in China that will foster and support the development of a Left-Right political division in Chinese society, because the natural conflict inherent in this ideological divide is a prerequisite for the kind of political change the Americans want to inflict on China. In fact, the Americans have gone so far as to conduct extensive studies on the regional social structures of China to determine where in the country they might find the highest concentrations of those who might be considered “conservative” or “Right-Wing”, and this is where they look for puppets and “democratic dissidents” they can use to provoke China’s national leaders. This is the source of Ai Weiwei, Chen Guangcheng, Liu Xiaobo, and many others. The Americans incite these people to provoke and provoke until the government has no choice but to act, then flood the international media with stories of China “cracking down” on “political dissidents”. It’s all a huge fraud, a kind of game the Americans love to play. But in reality, it is always possible in any country to find a few disaffected individuals who are weak-minded and incite them to provoke their governments, usually to their great personal detriment, but then these individuals are always expendable. Witness the little American darling Joshua Wong in Hong Kong, inspired by the American Consulate in HK to push his luck far past the limit and now spend perhaps 20 years in prison as a reward. But, as I said, these puppet-idiots are all expendable.

There is one saving grace that may protect China from this disease called “democracy”, a matter that seems to be entirely unknown in the West. Instead of adopting a new policy and hoping it works as intended, the government will conduct small trials in selected areas, perhaps sometimes for years, to learn the real-world effects on all segments of society, adjusting as they go, until they believe they have something that can work nationwide. It is only after such focused trials that new directions will be taken. It is my fervent hope they are doing this with the introduction of elections for local rural officials. Also, one portion of “democracy with Chinese characteristics” is that there are, and have been, many policy proposals where the Chinese leaders are uncertain of the range of the welcome such legislation might receive from the general population, or of the potential economic or other effects a particular new legislation. In the first case, prior to proposing any legislation, the government will form literally thousands of teams to circulate among the population nationwide to discuss the new proposed legislation and obtain a clear picture of the views and preferences of the people. And the government definitely does listen to the will of the people, taking great pains to explain the reasons for various proposals and to arrive at a solution compatible with the overall aims for the nation, but one that will have the support of the people. If this isn’t “democracy”, I don’t know what would be.

In an interview published in the Huffington Post some years ago, Helmut Schmidt, German’s former Chancellor, had this to say about the multi-party electoral system (“democracy”) for China:[1]

“Democracy is not the end point of mankind. Democracy has a number of serious failures. For instance, you have to be elected every four years and you have to be re-elected after the next four years. So, you try to tell the people what they would like to hear. The multi-party system is not the crown of progress ” . . . I would not sell it to the Chinese. The British have sold it to the Indians and to the Pakistanis and the Dutch tried to sell it to the Indonesians. Democracy is not really working in India. I would not tell the Egyptians to introduce democracy; nor would I pitch it to the other Muslim countries like Malaysia, Iran and Pakistan. It is a Western invention. It was not invented by Confucius. It did not work in ancient Rome [nor in Athens], and then it had not functioned in any other country in the world. And whether you become a democracy or not remains to be seen. My feeling is that [China] will not become a democracy.”

As I have noted elsewhere, the disparity between the quality of elected politicians in Western countries and the analogous officials in China’s government, especially at the national level in the Central Government, is a discrepancy so vast that comparisons are largely meaningless. Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, praised China’s President Xi Jinping as “a man of great breadth” and put him in “the Nelson Mandela class of persons”, saying “that man has iron in his soul”, and Xi has been widely praised (except in the US) as a man who “will become the first truly global leader”. These are not compliments we see being paid to Western politicians. Why would China want to change?

16.5. The Compradors

Still, the American interference project is very active in China today, the US government spending (by its own admission) more than $300 million each year inside China, searching for and coaching ‘dissidents’ and ‘democracy activists’ as well as other yuppie compradors wanting to ‘restructure’ China’s government to permit more foreign control.

I have often discussed various topics related to government, politics, the West, with groups of people in China – mostly young professionals, all university graduates, and have been frequently surprised at the attitudes of some who have been strongly influenced by foreign sources. The attitudes expressed, and even the words and phrases used, were too similar, almost verbatim, appearing to have come from some American source that was listing all the advantages of US-style “democracy”. I heard many comments like “China needs two political parties”, or “The West is so rich because it has democracy and a superior education system.” And so many others, cut from the same cloth, all idealised and false American propaganda, baseless and uninformed, riddled with American moral superiority and battered with a list of China’s comparative failings.

But when I explained, for example, that the West was rich primarily due to colonialism, to extermination of populations and looting of resources, these people were speechless. None appeared to have any idea that the US was encircling China with propaganda, with military, trying to infiltrate and collapse both China’s government and economy. None understood that the form of China’s government made it closed to foreign interference, which was primarily the reason the US wants China to open up and adopt multiple political parties. Most people to whom I spoke were naive, innocent, and dangerously unaware of the political forces surrounding them. These people were spellbound as I outlined many of these issues; they simply had no idea.

I fully concur with James Petras’ observation that “These Chinese yuppies imitate the worst of Western consumerist life styles and their political outlooks are driven by these life styles and Westernized identities which preclude any sense of solidarity with their own working class.” Many of these people are now embedded in China’s economic or other systems and are in position to do real harm. Many of them, especially ‘dissidents’ or ‘activists’ are supported and financed by American NGOs, but in their ignorance, they perceive no threat. To the extent that these people gain influence, they distract and weaken China, just as their traitorous counterparts did 150 years ago by effectively being intermediaries for their own colonisers.” As Petras again pointed out, the entire last crop of these Chinese collaborators were totally discredited before the Chinese people, and the same needs to happen again today.

President Xi has warned of the necessity to eradicate “subversive currents coursing through Chinese society”, as well as the dangers of American-financed NGOs in China, quoting a government document stating that “Western forces hostile to China and dissidents within the country are still constantly infiltrating the ideological sphere” and have “stirred up trouble” in many sensitive areas. I couldn’t agree more.

Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at:

2186604556@qq.com

Notes

[1] Helmut Schmidt: ‘I Would Not Sell Democracy To The Chinese’

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/01/china-democracy_n_5067120.html

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EN – LARRY ROMANOFF – Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion – Chapter 16 – China is Not the West

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