The mystery of China’s eagerness to own the term ‘democracy’
Once seemingly on the path towards liberalisation, China is now in position to redefine the term for the region, taking ownership and reshaping the term in its own, more authoritarian image
As I walked through central Beijing this week, I passed endless posters promoting “democracy” (minzhu). One might be forgiven for raising one’s eyebrows at a moment when the 20th anniversary of the Hong Kong handover prompts elegies for the fate of democracy in the SAR. Yet it is no longer just greater China where liberal democracy seems in peril. It may be in retreat all across Asia.
If so, that political trend would be a reversal of the past three decades. When the Joint Declaration on Hong Kong was signed in 1984, both the Chinese and the British sides shared two assumptions. One was that China would become more democratic over time. This was the era of top Communist leaders Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, who at times allowed startling levels of freedom of speech that seemed to indicate eventual liberalisation in a way hard to imagine in today’s China. The other assumption was that China would liberalise in the context of a rather undemocratic continent. In those cold war years, Japan and India were the only full liberal democracies in Asia.
One reason that the struggle for democratisation in Hong Kong has become so fierce in recent years is that the comparators have changed. Between 1984 and 1989, Hong Kong could believe it was going back to an authoritarian but liberalising power in a continent that was mostly undemocratic; rule by Beijing didn’t look so bad, or at least so anomalous. Today, Hong Kong can compare itself to cities such as Seoul, Taipei, and even Singapore and ask why it has less autonomy than these other cosmopolitan and democratic cities. Even a couple of years ago, the direction of travel in Asia itself seemed to be firmly toward democratisation.
Why, then, is the term “democracy” so powerful that the Party wants to own it? The answer may be a nod both to the past and the future. Back in the days of China’s war against Japan, Mao Zedong pioneered the “three-thirds” system which actually preserved the majority (two thirds) of the local assemblies for non-Party members. President Xi Jinping’s party is unlikely to permit that much loss of control, but it certainly wants to use an association with the Mao era to burnish its brand.
We now face the prospect of two hegemons in the region with different, but damaging views on liberal democracy. The US administration no longer seems to care for the presence of liberal government in Asia (or at home) as a good in its own right, a situation which has given Beijing the opportunity to redefine democracy in its own terms. Now the region needs a champion who will defend democracy not just for the economic and security benefits that it brings, but as a powerful ethical good in its own right. Ideally that should be a power within Asia; it is strange that a North American power has held that role for so many decades. But does such a champion exist? ■
Rana Mitter is director of the University China Centre at the University of Oxford and author of A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World and China’s War with Japan, 1937-45: The Struggle for Survival