Interview: Chinese governance far more legitimate than Western democracy, says expert

NEW YORK, Feb. 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese governance today "has far more legitimacy in terms of common acceptance or confidence than any Western democracy," according to one scholar in the United States.

John Pang, a senior fellow at Bard College, New York, said Chinese governance strives for constant improvements in the welfare of the people and bases its legitimacy on that welfare.

China's whole-process people's democracy and common prosperity are concepts that the West would have understood in its classical and Christian past under the notion of "the common good," while the idea is no longer understood in the West today. "Liberal democracy does not have a working conception of the common good," Pang said in an interview with Xinhua.

He pointed out that the question of the meaning of democracy remains critical, but China shouldn't be distracted into trying to explain itself in Western liberal terms.

"China has the oldest continuous political culture in the world, with nearly 3,000 years of written reflection on governance, the common good, inter-state relations, on the relationship between people, between people and state and people and nature. It has its own concept of the state, older than the West's, that integrates the individual, family, state and cosmos," Pang said.

China's success in combating the pandemic is a clear demonstration that its concept of state is alive and well, and China certainly does not need the West to lecture it about how to self-govern, he added.

Pang said he felt that it is now "nearly impossible" to talk about China in an objective way in Western academic and media spaces.

"An escalating propaganda war is being waged against China with relentless disinformation about Hong Kong, Xinjiang, the pandemic and every facet of China's present and past. This is supposed to demonize China and (the) Chinese people when the truth is that the modern West is undeniably founded on genocide, slavery and colonialism," Pang said.

"The discourse of democracy and of human rights that is being used to isolate China is a weaponized imperialist discourse," he noted.