China ranks 192nd in global survey on electoral freedom, 7th from bottom
That feeling when even North Korea ranks ahead of you in a democracy survey
In a new global survey which claims for the first time to classify countries according to their electoral freedom, China didn’t do so hot.
Out of 198 countries and territories around the world, China ranked 192nd in the 2018 World Electoral Freedom Index, ahead of only the South Sudan, Eritrea, Qatar, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, and Brunei.
China fared a bit worse than the other four remaining Communist states — Vietnam (180), Laos (182), Cuba (186), North Korea (190) — and was called “the largest electoral prison on the planet” by the study’s authors.
In case you’re curious, Ireland ranked 1st, the United Kingdom 9th, India 20th, the United States 44th, Germany 64th, Egypt 97th, Russia 134th, Turkey 135th, Iran 162nd, and Cambodia 175th.
The study, published earlier this month by the Foundation for the Advancement of Liberty, takes into account 55 indicators producing four sub-indices: political development, active suffrage, passive suffrage and elector empowerment.
China performed best on political development (150th), the country’s readiness for electoral freedom, and worst on elector empowerment (194th), the degree of empowerment of citizens in their role as electors.
Despite significant evidence to the contrary, China likes to claim that it is a democracy — if one with Chinese characteristics — as Isaac Stone Fish described in a Washington Post article last year:
China is now the world’s second-largest economy, and its rulers run it with an authoritarian ruthlessness that is envied by many politicians around the world. And yet Beijing goes on insisting — despite its lack of free and fair elections, uncensored media, or an independent judiciary — that it’s a democracy.
One recent article published by China’s state news agency Xinhua declared that “in China, democracy means ‘the people are the masters of the country.’ ” On a trip to Beijing in October, I saw several posters featuring an old man urging Chinese to “cherish the power of democracy, and cast their sacred and solemn vote.” One of China’s Communist Party Secretary Xi Jinping’s favorite slogans refers to the 12 “core socialist values” — of which democracy is second only to national prosperity. At a conference I attended last year, several Chinese Communist Party officials were quick to stress that, like the United States, China can accurately and credibly be called a democracy.
Every five years, China does have direct elections for local legislatures — the winners of which have the responsibility of choosing municipal delegates, who in turn select provincial legislators, who then choose members for China’s National People’s Congress, the country’s top legislature which chooses the country’s top leadership positions.
While there may have been about 2.5 million local lawmakers elected at the end of 2016, there was a notable lack of political rallies, debates, or “Get Out the Vote” campaigns in China. Local elections are heavily controlled with official election committees ultimately deciding on who gets on the ballot.
Independent candidates who try to fight the system are often harassed by local police, kept under surveillance, or simply detained. Prior to the local elections in Beijing in 2016, the BBC attempted to visit one independent candidate, but were blocked from doing so by thugs outside of her home.
For more than a century, Chinese leaders have argued that China can not have democracy because the country is too big and its people too uneducated to be trusted with such political power — or as then-president Jiang Zemin told CBS’ Chris Wallace in a 2000 interview: “The quality of our people is too low,” predicting that such a political system could only result in chaos.
Recently, China has used Donald Trump’s election and presidency to back up this theory about the instability of “Western democracy.” In March 2016, the nationalistic tabloid the Global Times penned an editorial asserting that Americans know that elections “cannot really change their lives,” so instead they support Trump, a “rich narcissistic and inflammatory candidate” with their “spleen.”
And, earlier this month, China’s official Xinhua news agency heaped more scorn on the American political system, writing that the US government shutdown had exposed yet more “chronic flaws.”
“The Western democratic system is hailed by the developed world as near perfect and the most superior political system to run a country,” the commentary read. “However, what’s happening in the United States today will make more people worldwide reflect on the viability and legitimacy of such a chaotic political system.”
Considering all of this, it’s probably also worth pointing out a quote that Mao Zedong gave to journalists in 1945, which circulated around Chinese social media in the wake of the 2012 presidential election in Taiwan:
This is how a free and democratic New China will be. All governments at various levels all the way to the central government will be elected through popular, fair and anonymous voting. They will be responsible to the people that elected them. It will be a fulfillment of Sun Yat-Sen’s Three Principles of the People, of Lincoln’s idea of government of the people, by the people, for the people; and Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. This will guarantee the independence, solidarity and unity of the nation, as well as its cooperation with the democratic nations of the world.
Taiwan, by the way, ranked 103rd on 2018 World Electoral Freedom Index, rating especially high (28th) in political development, but especially low (163rd) in active suffrage.
