‘Whole-process people’s democracy” is a mysterious phrase to Westerners, who assume that China’s political system, which has neither multiple competing parties nor Western-style general elections, can be in no way democratic.
Yet, when President Xi Jinping explains national rejuvenation—China’s second centenary goal of becoming a fully modernized, socialist nation by the 100th 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 human value and an ideal that has always been cherished by the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Chinese people”—to be used, he says, to address the issues that concern
