People of the Yi ethnic group in Zuosan village, Dali Bai autonomous prefecture, Yunnan province, vote to elect new deputies to the people's congress at county and town levels in December. ZHANG SHULU/FOR CHINA DAILY

Different from the West

Whole-process people's democracy is a hallmark of socialist democracy that distinguishes it from capitalist democratic systems, according to Wang Chen, vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress.

And unlike the multiparty electoral politics in many Western countries, where parties focus primarily on wooing votes with promises and defeating their rivals, China's socialist democracy runs through all processes, including elections, decision-making, management and supervision, he said.

William Jones, Washington bureau chief of the United States publication Executive Intelligence Review, said earlier "it's a very dynamic democracy that China has. It's more open, more inclusive than our democracy" in the US.

James Chin, professor of Asian Studies at the University of Tasmania in Australia, told China Daily that the concept or version of democracy is not a question of who is right and who is wrong, but "a question of political culture or which culture you come from".

Chin said there is "no single mode of democracy".

"Every country has its own political culture," he said. "If you think that you are correct, you want other people to follow you. So, the Americans like to push other people to adopt American liberal democracy because they think they are correct."

Glenn Wijaya, an adviser to the Center for Indonesia-China Studies, said rather than passing judgment on what democracy should look like, the world ought to let China prosper under its own model at this time.

In delivering a joint statement to the 49th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, Chen Xu, China's permanent representative to the UN Office in Geneva, said, "The key to democracy in a country lies in whether its people are truly masters of their country and whether problems that its people face are solved."

He noted that democracy and human rights are a common pursuit of humanity, and diversity is a fundamental feature of human society, so countries with different histories, cultures and national conditions may choose different forms of democracy.

China's democracy has two key components: "whole process", and "people's democracy".

"Whole process" means that all elements forming a democracy function and produce actual effects at all stages, according to Zhang Shuhua, director of the Socialist Democracy Research Center at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Thus, all major decisions are made through the collection of public opinion, democratic consultation at all levels, scientific and collective decision-making and proper supervision of the process.

"People's democracy" is the life of socialism, integrating electoral democracy and consultative democracy. The first refers to the exercise of the people's rights through elections and voting, while the latter means obtaining full consultation and seeking the greatest common ground among the people before key decisions are made and during reviews of the results.

Sayed said whole-process people's democracy "is a unique model of governance", with the CPC at the center while having other parties that represent different ethnic groups and different geographical regions in the country. This model of democracy has led to the country's impressive successes in addressing deep-rooted problems of the people.

"What stands out to me most is the fact that despite being a developing country, China successfully eradicated poverty by the end of 2021," he said, adding that this is something "many developed countries have not been able to achieve".

System delivers results

In February last year, China secured a complete victory in its fight against absolute poverty.

Over the past eight years, the final 98.99 million impoverished rural residents living under the poverty line have all been lifted out of poverty. All 832 impoverished counties and 128,000 villages have also been removed from the poverty list, and China has met the poverty eradication goals set out in the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 10 years ahead of schedule.

A World Bank report that came out in April showed that China has contributed close to three-fourths of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty.

Over the past four decades, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day — the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty — has fallen by close to 800 million, the World Bank said in a news release, adding that judged by China's current national poverty line, the number of poor fell by 770 million over the same period.

Poverty elimination success like China's is a product of good governance that does not happen overnight but involves arduous consultation and elections carried out from the ground up.

"Democracy is not truly practiced if the people's wishes and aspirations are only properly communicated on election day and nothing else," Wijaya said.

"I believe that as long as the economy is booming, ethnic groups are fairly represented, people from all walks of life can express their opinions, and the ruling party is not only vying for support because it wants to win elections but also because it genuinely wants to serve the people, that is enough," he added.

Xi has also said that whole-process people's democracy integrates process-oriented democracy with results-oriented democracy, procedural democracy with substantive democracy, direct democracy with indirect democracy, and people's democracy with the will of the state.

The CPC has been cultivating democracy from its birth through generations of leadership. Both in the 2017 report to the 19th CPC National Congress and in the report to the 20th CPC National Congress, Xi noted that China's socialist democracy is "the broadest, most genuine and most effective" of its kind.

In his address to a ceremony marking the CPC's centenary in 2021, Xi declared, "We will develop whole-process people's democracy."

In the eyes of Xi and many others, if the people are awakened only for voting but are not afterward, if they are given a song and dance during campaigning but have no say after the election, or if they are favored during canvassing but are left out in the cold after the election, such a democracy "is not a true democracy".

Paul Tembe, a South African expert on China, emphasized that "whole-process people' democracy is a putting-people-first type of development". China's National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference National Committee also offer outsiders a great opportunity to see how whole-process people's democracy operates.