Whole Process Peoples Democracy is a load of old Communist Dogs Bollocks.
Australian shills in Academia: It's not that they should know better, they do know better but talk nonsense anyway. No one qualified dares to call them out. Sigh. Up to me again.
I like the Social Sciences.
Once upon a time, on a campus far far away, I was a newly enrolled undergraduate student. I had to decide my course. I calculated that if I was really rich, I could do an Arts Degree in subjects like Politics, History, Asian Studies, Chinese language, among others.
I felt that these topics could all be useful in government jobs and even business, but try telling that to a recruitment manager.
I would then need to do another degree to actually get a job, and would miss many years of paid employment due to having initially studied the Arts Degree.
I was not rich. So I did not do an Arts Degree.
I liked the idea that other students, presumably with a Family Trust Fund behind them, were willing to study social sciences, so that there could be a segment of the population that could think the deep thoughts about society and then tell me all about it. They might also provide “thought leadership” and a robust defence against pro-dictatorship BS.
Arts Degrees, please take one…
In the toilets in the university refectory, someone (career guidance counsellor perhaps ?) had scrawled above the toilet roll:
ARTS DEGREES, PLEASE TAKE ONE.
This was disconcerting.
I was hoping someone else was learning something valuable. The lack of a business case for the social sciences had led to a staff quality situation where students in the humanities and social sciences felt they were getting a piece of paper worth less than the Hong Kong Basic Law1 would be, decades later.
The End of The End of History:2
Liberal Democracy (aka, actual, proper competitive democracy, buttressed by freedom of information and speech, and independent institutions like courts and police) is under threat globally.
The effectiveness of China’s propaganda warfare in the educational front in Australia has been enhanced by the lack of intellectual grunt applied to the social sciences in Australia and our unwillingness to call out pro Communist dogs bollocks when generated by our institutions, or the parasites who feed off them.
Countless examples abound3, let’s pretend to be social science students and do a case study.4
Case Study:
Whole Process People’s Democracy (全过程人民民主) and the co-opting of Australian Academics to legitimise and promote fig leaves for brutal dictatorship:
Whole Process People’s Democracy (WPPD) has its own website with links to speeches and essays about it.
Based on its own website and a google supplied selection of other sources, WPPD:
Appeared publicly first in a Xi Jin Ping speech on November 2, 2019, while Xi visited the Shanghai grassroots consultative center for the National People's Congress (NPC).
Is primarily a weapon of public opinion management, to provide a standardised script for arguing that China has the best political system.
Argues that anyone can define democracy. China has redefined the word and is therefore democratic.
Claim the USA is imposing it’s definition, rather than China trashing the accepted definition. As usual it’s always about the USA.
In the Chinese context, democracy means that the CCP will listen and seek the ideas and opinions of the public when making decisions.
It may be a superior form of dictatorship, if it knows what people want and gets buy in for it from the public. The name for this outside China is “Benevolent Dictatorship”.
Tan Huo Sheng, Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, Special Researcher of General Secretary Xi Jinping's Important Thought on Strengthening and Improving the Work of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Committee Beijing Research Base, (yawn), writing for (Chinese) Peoples Political Consultative Committee News5 (人民政协报）lists three points about WPPD:
People:
The CCP protects the weak and marginalised.6
Process:
Western democracy focuses on competitive elections, where politicians pursue self interest. In contrast, the CCP pursues the interests of “the people”7.
Whole:
Everyone gets to participate, all the time, not just waking up for socially divisive elections, and then falling asleep again.
Selling Chinese Snake Oil “Democracy”:
As part of the campaign to normalise perceptions (ie fool) people in the west to believe that China’s political system is somehow legitimate and non-evil, a range of borrowed mouths8 have been employed to disseminate this theme of current CCP propaganda.
All follow a standard script covering points that have been elucidated in CCP controlled Chinese language media and have Xi Jin Ping speeches as the original source.
One of the most comprehensive of the CCP borrowed mouths that I came across, the inspiration for this essay, is a Peoples Daily promoted video, with the interviewer a US Communist Party member employed by the People’s Daily, discussing WPPD with University of Sydney professor (!) John Keane.
We don’t know if Keane gets remuneration for helping Chinese media create propaganda content, but if not, the large number of CCP produced YouTube videos that he has starred in are testament to his generosity with his time.
Link to video Blazing a trail:
Keane’s key points are common to all iterations9 by different borrowed mouths produced in this propaganda campaign:
China is attacked unfairly by not being described as democratic.
It is different from selfish market based “liberal” democracy.
Greeks didn’t have elections.
Government relies on 民意 mín yì) popular will.
Democracy is essentially about the people being the masters of the country
He gets to mention his pet “monitory democracy” concept.
As time runs out he seems to be reading from a list10:
China has:
Village elections
Peoples Mediators
Neighbourhood assemblies
Other political parties
Anti corruption measures
Public opinion polling
A “blue map app” for environmental monitoring
Virtual petitions, e-consultations and on-line question and answer sessions
QED - China is actually more democratic than anywhere else, especially the West, especially the USA.11
All of which are designed to obfuscate a number of fundamental points:
North South East West and Center too, The Party Controls Everything.
No organisation is independent of the party, or can contradict the party and this has tightened in the past decade12, for example:
The purpose of the media and entertainment industry’s role is to tell the party’s story well13 so that people think what the party wants14.
The legal system must above all serve the party15.
The education system must serve the party.16
All organisations, government, NGO17, state owned or private enterprise18, all have CCP organisations within them, and monitor and advise management in these organisations.
As you no doubt already know, China is not only a dictatorship, but it is a very strict one, with extremely low flexibility for independent thought, discussion or action.
All of this could be discussed by me in great detail, but it should be up to a social sciences academic to demolish the pseudo-intellectual bollocks peddled by Professor Keane.
Instead, to refute his regurgitation of People’s Daily propaganda lines, there is deafening silence. Either there is no one with the competence, or they are all afraid of retaliation. Or, do they think it is so unimportant that they should not care ?
I’m just doing my best to point out the obvious.
So Why Care ?
Some People Will Be Fooled
Judging by the comments after WPPD propaganda videos on YouTube, lots of ordinary people are fooled.
At the highest levels of political office, awareness of how China works may be low. MP’s win their seat by understanding local issues, not by understanding the political systems of foreign countries.
Despite a Masters in Philosophy, Politics and Economics under a Rhodes scholarhip at Oxford, former PM Tony Abbott was clueless when Xi Jin Ping referred to democratic reform in a speech in Australia in 2014. He thanked Xi for choosing Australia as a place to announce democratic transition for China when in fact Xi was mouthing meaningless platitudes.
In Abbott's case it was merely embarrassing, but evil politicians could recycle the “China as democratic” argument, blended with “they have their own system” (they are just an evil dictatorship). They would do this to facilitate and extend normalisation of Australian interaction with CCP linked organisations, as if they were the same as other countries, not tools of thugs and agents of influence that we must collectively unite to fight against.
Peddling CCP Propaganda is Information Warfare Against Australia and Democracy.
Stooges like Keane have taken sides against actual academic thinkers -the Liu Xiao Bo’s and other free thinkers of this world, who end up in jail, and later dead, because they thought “Chinese democracy” was suboptimal and were brave enough to say so. These heroes are killed by the people who broadcast, and I assume directly or indirectly reward, John Keane’s CCP sponsored videos.
His arguments are easily refuted by anyone with a reasonable knowledge of China. He surely knows he is spouting rubbish.
This is not academic discourse, this is the ugly face of information warfare.
Post Script:
Are you one of the People ?
We should take offence at the butchering of the English language and misappropriation of an important word (democracy).
However:
The Chinese words 民主 mín zhǔ - normally translated as democracy, breaks down as “rule (主 zhǔ) by the people (民 mín)”. Since “The People” are defined by Communists as people who support them, and “the Enemy” are people who do not support them, then, by twisted CCP logic, the CCP dictatorship is rule by “The People”.
If you are classed as “The People” maybe you don’t care, since you benefit at the expense of the rest of society, possibly, the majority.
So when a Chinese official says “The Chinese People enjoy Democracy”, he knows he means “people” who support the CCP (John Keane types) are happy their “enemies” (Liu Xiao Bo types) are defeated.
The CCP have developed “othering” into an extreme form.
If you don’t support the CCP, you are not a “people”.
you might like:
Lu Kang : 香港基本法就是一张废纸。 Lu Kang, Chinese official - referred to the Hong Kong Basic Law as a “piece of waste paper”, ie China could CCP-ify Hong Kong and ignore rights granted in UN approved international agreement.
“The End of History and The Last Man” - Francis Fukuyama, 1992 - posited that liberal democracy in some form would become the default political system for most countries going forward. Now while Russia sinks ever lower into an abyss, China promotes it’s Dictatorship as a model for other nations to emulate, which suits plenty of Dictators just fine.
Especially around the Broadway complex (Usyd, UTS)
Don’t worry, This is all for free.
报，I assume they mean 报纸， news. CPPPC’s own media.
谈火生：清华大学社会科学学院政治学系副教授、习近平总书记关于加强和改进人民政协工作的重要思想北京研究基地特约研究员
so long as you fit the classification of being of “the people”
so long as you fit the classification of being of “the people”, ie are in or support the CCP.
see Borrowed mouths to speak on Xinjiang (ASPI) or just search “Borrowed Mouths” for more discussion of this concept.
sources:
Peoples Daily online: Blazing a Trail
Wikipedia Whole Process Peoples Democracy page
Wikipedia: China: Democracy That Works page
PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs (FMPRC) website: Whole-process People’s Democracy Is A High Quality Democracy
FMPRC Website: Understanding China’s Whole-Processed People’s Democracy
Peoples World (Daily Worker): ‘Whole Process People’s Democracy’ in China: What does it mean?May 9, 2023
Global Times: Whole-process people's democracy is a kind of dynamic interaction Published: Mar 07, 2023
Beijing Review 21 Oct 2022: Key Concept | What is whole-process people's democracy?
PRC State Council Website March 9 2022: Understanding China's whole-process people's democracy at 'two sessions'
YouTube videos like this one:
Amongst the waffle there is information available on the 全过程人民民主 WPPD website:
The National Committee of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference website: 发展全过程人民民主凸显社会主义协商民主的价值和作用2023-06-14
Sky News Andrew Bolt: Teacher praises China’s dictatorship as a ‘kind of democracy’ September 08, 2022
wonder who provided the list…..
In another video Keane explains that democracy was invented in the East….
Guided by Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, the newspaper should firmly grasp the right direction of public opinion and direct the Party's innovative theory into the hearts of the people.
Chinese Media Absolute Loyalty to the Party
China universities must become Communist party 'strongholds', says Xi Jinping
Strategic responses of NGOs to the new party-building campaign in China
Private sector control by CCP units.