On July 6, the International Image Communication Innovation Forum of the Communist Party of China (2023) was successfully held in Shanghai. Nearly 200 Chinese and foreign guests from central ministries and commissions, local provinces and municipalities, international organizations, colleges and universities, think tanks, media, enterprises, etc., as well as international youth representatives, conducted in-depth exchanges and discussions on the theme of "Telling the Story of Chinese-style Modernization".
This article is David Ferguson's keynote speech, compiled by the Observer Network based on live shorthand scripts, and has not been reviewed by the speaker himself.
In 2006, Ferguson crossed the ocean from the UK to China. For more than a decade, he has mainly worked in journalism and publishing. As the honorary English editor-in-chief of the Foreign Languages Publishing House of CIPG, Ferguson is an expert in the revision of the English translation of the English translation of the first to fourth volumes of Xi Jinping on Governance, and has participated in the revision and editing of many government white papers and other key books in the mainland.
Ferguson has not only witnessed China's development, but also spread more Chinese voices to the world from the perspective of a Westerner. In 2021, he received the Chinese Government Friendship Award for his outstanding contributions to promoting cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries.
【Speech/David Ferguson】
Dear leaders, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, hello!
The Western political model is not actually suitable for the needs of some underdeveloped countries, and few poor and underdeveloped countries adopt the Western political model and end up succeeding and prospering as a result. We see that many countries were not poor before they became Western democracies, and Ukraine and Russia each lost 2/3 of their GDP, which happened after they became Western democracies in the 90s of the 20th century. Libya, the most stable and orderly country on the entire African continent, is now a democracy with many broken developments. Its main industry, which used to be oil, is now human trafficking.
So there is a reason if the Western model of democracy is imposed on other countries but does not work. Because Western countries do not first become democracies and then have corresponding prosperity, they should first become rich and prosperous, and then choose to become a democratic system, which is the path of modernization and development. In order for us to deeply understand and discuss China's modernization path, we must make a dialectical analysis of the entire history of modernization around the world.
The path of modernization followed by the developed Western countries is based on what I call the "three exploits", starting with the ruthless exploitation of their own domestic working class, which has become fodder for factories in industrial cities, living in very terrible poverty and in deprivation of living conditions. In the United States, they also exploited millions of slaves as rural labor. The second is the ruthless exploitation of other countries, whether through colonialism or invasion and land occupation, in order to plunder the corresponding resources. The third point is the relentless exploitation of the environment, and it took the West 200 years to fully understand that modernization through the destruction of the environment is not a good idea.
None of these exploitations can be tolerated and imagined in today's world, and China's modernization path clearly cannot follow these patterns.
The idea that the poor are a resource that can be exploited runs counter to the ideals of the Chinese Communist Party. China's relations with the rest of the world are based on openness, peace and friendship and common development, such as China's development initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative. In terms of the environment, China has studied in less than 40 years what the West could only understand for two centuries. Chinese-style modernization is based on a complete set of structures and processes, based on a series of actions that are compatible with the modern world and China's national conditions, and together they constitute the whole process of people's democracy, which is also the theme of our first sub-forum, which I would like to further communicate with you.
Ferguson is an expert in the English translation of the English translation of the first to fourth volumes of Xi Jinping on Governance. Picture from Foreign Language Publishing House
Biden recently gave a public speech, but he knew nothing about China's political system, its structure, and how it works. China is a constitutional state governed by a written constitution, no one can act outside the authority of the constitution, and any amendments and proposals to the constitution must be approved by the appropriate authorized body in accordance with prescribed procedures. One of the most important features of China's political system is that the managers are the people who can really see in front of you, you can see that they are governing, you can see that the whole country is jointly run by the National People's Congress, the Central Committee, the Politburo and the president.
The second very important feature is that these people are able to say their future plans very clearly, even make it feel like some "boring" details, and then go to the real practice. For example, we talked about the five-year plan, the ten-year plan, and the reports at the two sessions.
The situation in the West is completely different, only fools believe that the United States is run by Biden, and smart people who pretend to believe are liars, which makes the vast majority of politicians, media, political commentators in the United States liars.
In fact, ordinary people in the United States cannot see or know who is ruling them, you don't know who is ruling you, you have no way to contact them, and there is no way to influence them, which means that the so-called American-style democracy is actually a scam. In the United States, politicians almost never do what they promise to do. The fundamental purpose of the Communist Party of China is to govern the country according to the best interests of the people, and in the United States, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are more like machines, their fundamental purpose is to protect their rights, and then firmly grasp this right. The Communist Party learned very important lessons from the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and everything the Communist Party has done over the past 50 years has been beneficial to Chinese people.
Has the Chinese Communist Party instigated any groundless war in a distant part of the world? How many poor, innocent, defenseless people died in these wars? The answer is: no! On the contrary, the Chinese Communist Party has worked endlessly to transform China's economy and society, which in the 70s was poorer than sub-Saharan Africa, but it is now a middle-income country, close to high-income countries, the world's second-largest economy, and soon the largest. In China, every child and child has the right to free and compulsory education, and illiteracy among children and young people is almost non-existent. I know many Chinese students who have better English than American citizens.
American teenagers' math and reading skills are at their lowest in 30 years
The Chinese Communist Party's governance has succeeded in building a welfare state from scratch that provides basic security for all the people, much better than what developed Western countries can offer, such as China's pension system. My sister-in-law is an ordinary worker in China, she retired at the age of 50 (the retirement age for women in the UK is 60), and now she is 66 years old, and she actually receives a better proportion of her pension in China than I do in the UK.
Over the past 50 years, the Chinese Communist Party's governance has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and no other country has been able to achieve such an ambitious goal, and China has now developed strategies to ensure that the living standards of the poor continue to improve and continue to narrow the income gap.
The key to economic development is to move people, goods and information quickly and efficiently. There is an old saying in China: if you want to get rich, build roads first, and to a large extent, China can be said to have the best infrastructure in the world, which has always been a key factor in economic development and poverty alleviation.
America's infrastructure is dilapidated and crumbling, society is close to collapse, and the level of violence is extraordinary. If you look at social media, you can see endless conflicts and confrontations, shootings, robberies, assaults and even individuals robbing stores during the day, which is now simply accepted as "inevitable." The homicide rate in the United States is 5 times higher than in any other developed country, and more than 10 times that in China, and large-scale shootings occur frequently, which is very chilling. Every day in the United States, about 50 people walk the streets and enjoy life, but they do not know that today is their last day on earth because they may be shot.
I said before that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are just machines and have no interest in "good governance" because it is not something they care about, the only thing they care about is to win the next election, and to win the election in the distorted American system, the most important thing is to win the media headlines, which is why one of the most important entourage of American politicians is their chief opinion expert, and Chinese politicians do not need this opinion turn expert or public relations expert.
Westerners hype the superiority of their system, there is so-called freedom of speech, and I often meet people on social media who gleefully say to me, "Can I call my presidential bastard, can you call your presidential bastard?" "I was very patient to explain to them that a system that allows you to call the president an asshole is no better than a system that doesn't allow a bastard to be president!
Western democracy revolves entirely around the three Cs: competition, confrontation and conflict, that is, competition, confrontational, and conflicts. But the vast majority of normal people do not like conflict, when there is conflict in family, friends or work, it is very uncomfortable for them, of course, some people actively enjoy conflict. These self-centered, narcissistic, corrupt, violent bullies, greedy for power, do not have any human capacity for empathy. Such people will develop well in the Western political system, and it is a characteristic of this system that there are very unpleasant and dysfunctional people at the highest levels of American politics.
China's whole process of people's democracy is also based on the three Cs: Cooperation, consultation and continuity, cooperation is the participation of a large number of people from all walks of life in the people's congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, to achieve a cooperative consultation, that is, individual citizens have the constitutional right to put forward opinions and suggestions on legislation, and the legislative authorities also have the constitutional obligation to listen to their opinions. Continuity, the development, piloting, review and replication of strategies, will last for years or even decades.
Westerners trumpet the superiority of their system because they have voting and elections, but voting and elections are only processes, not results. What poor people in developing countries need is results, not processes, and they need roofs in houses, food to eat, clothes to wear, jobs, children to go to school, safe streets and a better future. In other words, what they need is a basic prosperity, which is an outcome, not a process.
You can't vote for prosperity, you can't achieve prosperity by ticking a cross in a small voting room, you can only achieve prosperity by working hard. And you can only work for prosperity if you meet certain basic conditions, the two most basic conditions are long-term stability and order, and China's whole-process people's democracy and the long-term stable governance of the Communist Party of China provide a prerequisite for the Chinese people to work for prosperity.
In fact, there is only one country in the entire history of the earth that has been poor and underdeveloped and has become a Western-style democracy, and that is Estonia. Estonia has a population of 1.5 million, representing 1/50 of the developing world, Western democracy has proved its strength to 1/50 of the developing world, while China is 1000 times larger than Estonia, China has achieved the same degree of success as Estonia, and her population accounts for almost 1/4 of the developing country, if you are interested in the result rather than the process, then the superiority and advantages of China's whole-process people's democracy are indisputable.
Thank you guys!
This article is an exclusive manuscript of Observer.com, the content of the article is purely the author's personal opinion, does not represent the platform's views, unauthorized reproduction, otherwise legal responsibility will be pursued. Follow the observer network WeChat guanchacn and read interesting articles every day.