Experts criticize China's sham democracy paper

"It is wrong to have any hope of Hu [Jintao] making political reforms in China."

Ming Chu-cheng, NTU professor

China's first white paper on democracy, published last Wednesday, was nothing more than "propaganda," and it actually tells the international community to stop daydreaming about democracy in China, officials and analysts said yesterday.

A private forum held by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) affiliated Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, discussed the recently published white paper, China analysts said the propaganda-style white paper revealed how little the Chinese authorities know about democracy, as it insisted on making a distinction between Western style democracy and that practiced in China.

The 74-page white paper, entitled Building of Political Democracy in China emphasized China's insistence on developing its own system of democracy as "the situations differ from one country to another, the paths the people of different countries take to win and develop democracy are different." The paper said that China's path is one of "socialist democracy with its own characteristics," which has "realized the Chinese people's demand to be masters of their own country."

MOFA Spokesperson Michel Lu (呂慶龍) yesterday said "the white paper is merely a piece of propaganda. It reflects its intention to create a theory on democracy to justify the demands from the outside world to open up to political democracy," the ministry spokesman said.

Ruan Ming (阮銘), a national policy adviser to the president said during the forum, "China's democracy white paper is actually very offensive in the sense that it tells the international community, which still hold hopes for democracy in China, to stop dreaming of such an idea."

Ruan said China's purpose in issuing the white paper is to strengthen Chinese President Hu Jintao's (胡錦濤) ambition to become a hegemon.

Ming Chu-cheng (明居正), a National Taiwan University political science professor specializing in Chinese politics from analyzed Hu's rise to power, saying Hu was actually handpicked by the late CCP leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) as an alternative successor to him because initially Deng did not fully trust Jiang Zemin (江澤民).

"The reason Hu found it possible to make his way to the top is because he has shown he has the nerve to kill people," Ming said, referring to Hu's record of ordering numerous bloody suppressions of Tibetans and Chinese dissidents.

"It is wrong to have any hope of Hu carrying out political reforms in China," Ming said, adding that the kind of democratic definition China claims in line with its own national and social characteristics is not true democracy at all.

Tung Li-wen (董立文), director of the Democratic Progressive Party's International Affairs Department, said the white paper revealed the worrying tendency that political reform in China is likely to be postponed, as well as beijing's attempt to build up of an "anti-democracy" discourse in the country.