Opinion | China claims democracy isn’t just Western. Is it hype or history?
- Many supposedly ‘Western’ democratic ideas about winning hearts and minds, and the pursuit of happiness, actually derived from Confucian thought
- In recent years China has revived the Confucian principle that government should improve people’s lives, yet the US seems more concerned with identity politics
So far, Western media outlets have largely avoided debating those claims, but if they did, most would reject them as propaganda. After all, everyone knows democracy is, was, and always will be Western. It’s in our blood.
Or is it? As early as 2014, a Princeton study reclassified the US political system as more like an oligarchy than a democracy, and a recent report from the Pew Research Centre revealed that: “Few believe US democracy, at least in its current state, serves as a good model for other nations.”
Still more recently, The Guardian reported that the international IDEA think tank has added the US to its annual list of “backsliding democracies” for the first time.
Diamonds are forever; democracies? Not so much. During the 20th century, plenty of democracies have transformed into proto-fascist regimes while retaining the ritual of elections.
But what about the opposite? Could a system that rejects national elections still pursue democratic policy goals? History can shed some light on that question.
