Robert Lawrence Kuhn*

 

Other than global economic and social imbalances, and climate change, human rights are the most important challenge for the international community.

 

If our group can articulate the “Shared Human Values” of Human Rights, and can array the “Diversified International Approaches” — in this forum and in future forum — we will have made a vital contribution to China’s role in the world, and to the wellbeing of the entire world. I look forward to contributing.

 

My presentation today focuses on the link between human rights and what China calls its “Whole-Process People’s Democracy” — a mysterious phrase to Westerners, who assume that China’s political system, which has neither multiple parties nor general elections, can be in no way democratic.

 

Yet, when General Secretary Xi Jinping explains China’s great rejuvenation — China’s Second Centenary Goal of becoming a fully modernized, socialist nation by the 100^th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China in 2049 — he uses six aspirational adjectives, the third of which is “democratic”. He calls democracy “a shared value of humanity and a key tenet upheld by the Party and the Chinese people” — to be used, he says, “to solve the problems that the people want to solve.”

 

The Party’s call is to expand the orderly political participation of the people, to strengthen the protection of human rights and the rule of law, and to ensure that the people enjoy extensive rights and freedoms in accordance with the law. Thus, enhancing Whole-Process People’s Democracy enhances human rights.

 

Democracy in the Party-led system involves absorbing public opinion via feedback mechanisms, such as polling to discern what people think, for example about proposed new policies — a process that the Party calls “pooling people’s wisdom.” Another example is when officials are nominated to new positions, there is a period of time for candid feedback from colleagues and subordinates as well as from superiors. So, even though there are no elections in the Western sense, there is a good deal of engagement with different constituencies. In enhancing Whole-Process People’s Democracy, General Secretary Xi Jinping calls for upholding and improving the people’s congress system, stressing properly and effectively exercising their power of oversight. Moreover, the Report to the 20^th National Congress of the CPC every five years, and of the government at the National People’s Congress every year, reflect a great deal of input and suggestions from all relevant officials, experts and constituencies. The documents circulate iteratively many times during the six to eight months or more of the drafting period. I like to stress the increasing role of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) in the development of deliberative and consultative democracy — because even though the CPPCC has no formal power, it has the growing social powers of expertise, influence and public pressure.

 

I have been coming to China for more than 30 years. I have traveled across China, visiting over 100 cities, with my long-term partner, Adam Zhu, for research and interviews, books and essays, television and documentaries. Yet, as much as I thought I knew China, I did not appreciate all that is required for poverty alleviation until I visited poor regions, especially remote mountain villages and spoke with poor villagers.

 

It was in 2013 that General Secretary Xi Jinping first proposed the concept of “targeted” or “precision” poverty alleviation. “Targeted” meant standardized procedures and individualized programs to bring each poor family out of poverty. Five levels of local Party secretaries coordinated their roles — provincial, municipal, county, township, village. Third-party evaluations were conducted regularly and randomly to ensure accuracy and honesty.

 

I was startled to discover that every poor family in China had its own file — that’s millions of poor families, each with its own customized plan, each checked monthly, and digitized for central compilation and analysis. Equally startling, local officials were dispatched to impoverished villages to manage poverty alleviation, sometimes for two years.

 

After China eliminated all extreme poverty in 2020, relative poverty was still extant, of course, and thus General Secretary Xi Jinping set a broader, longer-range, multi-decade goal: Common Prosperity.

 

My friends in China ask, why does the world misunderstand the Party? The problem, I argue, is partly semantics — because the English word “party” connotes, in democratic political systems, a political party that competes in free and open multiparty elections, such that when a ruling party does not compete in free and open multi-party elections, that political system is deemed not democratic.

 

This portrait mispaints the Chinese system, which is founded on a different principle, where the Party is the ruling organization, not a competing political party — it is a dedicated elite from all sectors of society, consisting of less than 7 percent of the population but tasked to represent 100 percent of the population.

 

Thus, the Party, as the ruling organization, is not the equivalent of a ruling political party in Western systems, where political parties represent only a certain group of voters and are time-bounded by election cycles.

 

For this reason, the Chinese Party, the CPC, has a higher and broader obligation to enhance the living standards and personal well-being of all Chinese citizens. This includes reforms, rule of law, transparency in government, public participation in governance, increasing democracy, and various freedoms (including freedoms of expression), and, of course, human rights. These are real challenges.

 

All political parties, all political systems, have trade-offs, and while achieving national objectives is indeed an advantage of China’s Party-led system, it is not the only criterion for evaluating systems. This is why continuing reform, opening up, and system improvement are needed.

 

Looking ahead, given that both democracy and human rights are aspirational as part of China’s mid-century goals, what kinds of system improvements need be made? What are the boundaries for improvements? What is the optimal balance between development to achieve Common Prosperity, and freedom of expression — and how will that balance change over time?

 

A final point about General Secretary Xi Jinping. Foreigners may be surprised to learn that he considered poverty alleviation to be his most important task. He made the remarkable statement: “I have spent more energy on poverty alleviation than on anything else.” I know no other national leader who has made such an assertion.

 

For China, poverty alleviation exemplifies human rights. And for the Party, to develop both human rights and democracy is both a mission and a challenge.