Did MS. Zhang and China government really respect their great leader Mao ZaDong? :-) Life is a giggle!!! I told you Mr. Chen (Taiwan) and Mr. Mao (China) are very much alike.
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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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