December 10: Abdul Khan, Deepak Sah

YouTube: December 9

China bids farewell to Indian envoy with hopes for easing in border tensions As Vikram Misri prepares to leave his Beijing posting, both sides agreed there was a ‘silver lining’ for bilateral ties ....... Chinese foreign minister warns against the two countries exhausting each other, as India takes first delivery of Russian missiles ...... Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned against “mutual exhaustion” with neighbouring India and agreed there was a “silver lining” in bilateral ties, despite the arrival of India’s first delivery of long-range missiles from Russia.

China is proud of its own democracy, and wants no part of the flawed US model China’s whole-process democracy seeks to meet people’s wish for a better life, and the country’s achievements speak for themselves ....... The US ‘democracy’ summits are a farce, given their lack of appreciation of national conditions elsewhere and respect for other people’s choices ...... The story of modern China attests to the Communist Party’s commitment to democracy and shows China to be deserving of the name of a people’s democracy. ........ From the days of “bean voting” in Yanan, where Chinese people voted with beans in place of paper ballots to ensure the illiterate had a vote, to the enactment of the first constitution of the People’s Republic of China in 1954, to the recent introduction of the important concept of “whole process democracy”, China’s socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics has gradually taken shape. ........... China’s whole-process democracy has pragmatic practices that effectively protect people’s extensive democratic rights, which are exercised through a combination of elections, consultations, decision-making, management and oversight. .......... it is people-oriented and welcomes widespread participation. China’s democracy is not the kind that wakes up at the time of voting then goes back to being dormant afterwards. People have the full right to know, express their views, and supervise government performance. ......... In China, all the 2.62 million deputies in the five levels of people’s congresses, from the National People’s Congress down to provinces, cities, counties and townships, are elected by the people. The 33 ethnic minorities with very small populations, including the Jinuo and Lhoba, all have their own delegates to the NPC. Chinese people are deeply engaged in state affairs, especially local-level governance. .......... Since 2012, the public has been invited to comment on 187 draft laws, and about 3 million opinions and suggestions collected from 1.1 million submissions. .......

the Civil Code that came into effect this year. To draft the code, the NPC solicited opinions online 10 times. A total of 1.02 million opinions from 425,000 people were received, and many of them adopted.

......... China eradicated absolute poverty in a historic achievement, becoming a moderately prosperous society. ........ has created more than 10 million new jobs each year for 15 years running, a number equivalent to the population of a mid-sized country. .........

about 90 per cent of senior officials and civil servants in party and government offices come from households of average income.

........ whole-process democracy values sound governance and produces encouraging results. Under the party’s leadership, China’s democratic politics saw healthy development and its governance capacity has steadily improved, a sign of China’s institutional advantages. ......... Trust in government is high in China. In a survey conducted in the early days of the pandemic, a US public relations firm found that Chinese people’s trust in their government reached 95 per cent, a rise of 5 percentage points from a similar survey a year ago. China topped the world in this survey of 11 countries. .........

Democracy is not the prerogative of a few nations, but a common value for all of humanity. It takes diverse forms, and no country could monopolise the definition and jurisdiction of democracy. China will not impose its own democratic model on others, nor will it accept the lecturing of some self-appointed judges.

...... To our dismay, the United States, with its interventionist arrogance, has shut its eyes to its problems at home and its own flaws in democracy and human rights, and remained obsessed with selling its model of democracy to the rest of the world. ........ Most recently, the US has even gone so far as to weaponise democracy by organising two so-called “summits for democracy”. The motive behind its move is clear – to revive the Cold War mentality, incite division and confrontation, and protect its hegemony. These so-called “democracy” summits are a farce. They will produce nothing but a standing joke for the world. ...................

Liu Guangyuan is Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region