When President Hu Jintao last visited Washington in 2006, protestors were only too eager to remind the Chinese leader of his country’s poor record on human rights and democracy.
But last week, as the United States once again played host to the Chinese leader, it wasn’t so much what the protestors did that made news headlines. This time, the media coverage centred on the offhand remarks of Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader.
During an interview with Jon Ralston in his home state of Nevada earlier last week, Reid had this to say about President Hu: ‘Jon, I'm going to go back to Washington tomorrow and meet with the president of China. He is a dictator. He can do a lot of things through the form of government they have.’
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But then, having perhaps realised what he had just said, Reid quickly added: ‘Maybe I shouldn't have said “dictator”. But they have a different type of government than we have and that's an understatement.’
An understatement? Really? Or is it actually an overstatement?
It’s certainly true that China is no utopia. There is no denying that the country remains a one-party state which only very infrequently tolerates dissent, continues to violate the human rights of its citizens, censures religious freedom, and openly censors the free flow of information. Just last month, the Communist Party of China publicly condemned the Nobel Committee for awarding the 2010 Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo for his human rights activism in China. Liu Xiaobo, as one official Chinese spokesman said, is a ‘criminal’, and awarding him the prize amounts to ‘a complete violation of the principles of the prize and an insult to the Peace Prize itself’. China’s shortcomings in this regard cannot, and should not, be overlooked.
But having said that, it’s also true to say that China and its system of political governance have, during the reform period, become something altogether different to what it was under Mao. As Peter Foster writes, ‘China is far from free, but three decades after 150 years of invasions, civil wars and political upheaval finally came to a close, it is a long way from the totalitarian state it has at times appeared to be’. Likewise, the China expert Baogang He has emphasised that the ‘totalitarian paradigm is no longer appropriate’ for understanding contemporary China.
So how then should we understand contemporary China?
Through the paradigm of ‘incremental democracy’, argues Yu Keping, the eminent