West shies away from discussing Chinese democracy, say Brazilian experts

MEXICO CITY, April 27 (Xinhua) -- At a time when China is outperforming Western liberal democracies in economic growth, healthcare and other development markers, it is necessary to discuss the merits of its system of government, Brazilian news website Other Words (Outras Palavras) has reported.

In an a recent op-ed article headlined "Controversy: Is it heretical to speak of Chinese democracy?", commentators Diego Pautasso and Isis Paris Maia wonder why that discussion is not taking place in Western media.

The answer, they suggest, is that democracy as it is practiced in the world's traditional "democracies" isn't at all democratic, so stifling any debate and avoiding comparisons "allows us to ignore the crisis of democracies in the West."

Western democracies have devolved into full on plutocracies beholden to big business and incapable of meeting the most basic needs of their populations, they wrote.

In the United States, "the archetypal country of what democracy should be," political participation is low "since the electoral system has been configured in such a way that it is reduced to two parties," they noted.

"Worse still, there are huge financial barriers" to holding public office, so that only billionaires or candidates backed by corporate interests can aspire to represent the people, essentially robbing the average tax payer of representation.

"A Senate seat costs an average of almost 20 million U.S. dollars and a seat of House of Representatives around 1.5 million U.S. dollars," said the authors.

"What is seen by many as the 'greatest democracy in the world'" is the global leader in locking people up behind bars, they wrote, noting it is "first in the world ranking of prison population, with more than 625 people (incarcerated) for every 100,000 inhabitants."

With money replacing merit as the key to high office, "it is not surprising that the COVID-19 pandemic is another emblematic case of government inefficiency. The world's greatest power, with less than 5 percent of the world's population, has had about a quarter of the world's cases and a fifth of the number of deaths. There is something dysfunctional in a system that does not guarantee its ultimate goal, which is well-being," said the authors.

"While Western countries face mounting difficulties, China has shown surprising and unequivocal socio-economic success," they said. "It is naive or malicious to think that the legitimacy and administrative efficiency that have produced the remarkable results in China are the result of arbitrary decisions."

China's "exponential development" should arouse curiosity instead of censure in the West, the authors said, but for increasingly obvious reasons, it hasn't.