FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
You Choose: Western Imperium ‘Liberal Democracy’ or Democracy as China Is Developing It
Feb. 13, 2018 (EIRNS)—In her Feb. 8 weekly webcast, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche called for a healthy, democratic and international debate on the two respective merits of the two principal systems contending today, the British Empire or the Chinese. EIR recommends reading the biting op-ed column published in Global Times on Feb. 11 on “Democracy: A Western Tool for Domination,” as a useful contribution to this much-needed debate.
Author Thomas Hon Wing Polin opens:
“Having failed to stem the expansion of Chinese political and economic influence worldwide, the Western imperium will doubtless focus its stop-China efforts in the years ahead on its favorite hobby-horse: democracy. The West’s secularism and democracy also serve as an invaluable beachhead for the empire to destabilize and even regime-change those non-Western governments it doesn’t like.”
Hon describes “democracy’s” targetting of nations, explaining “If things go smoothly, regime change occurs. Otherwise, a nice color revolution is brewing.” So,
“the West’s propaganda line of attack against China will be: Since democracy is self-evidently the best governance system known to man, all right-thinking people hanker after it. Those that don’t are ... sub-human.
“The empire speaks as though it has a monopoly on democracy. But it doesn’t. Take the case of China. The Chinese term for ‘democracy’ is minzhu—which literally means ‘the people are in charge.’ ”
Western-style liberal democracy is only one form of democracy, and it “is at bottom an oligarchy that serves the interests of a tiny minority at the expense of the vast majority,” Hon points out.
Nor are democratic ideas exclusively Western, he states. In the 4th century B.C., China’s
“Mencius was advocating the people’s right to remove their leaders if the latter weren’t doing their jobs properly. The notion, advanced by Confucianism’s premier philosopher after Confucius himself, was radical. It later developed into the Mandate of Heaven—the core concept of traditional Chinese governance....
“The governance system of today’s China—call it ‘centralized meritocracy’—is still a work in progress, evolving along with the country. It contains flaws that need to be tackled and ironed out,”
Hon readily acknowledges. “But in the fundamental sense of putting the people’s interests first, China is already more democratic than the West.”
