A few years back, at a meeting of senior UK businessmen in UK, a leading investment banker asked the Chinese Ambassador “How many more years will it take for China to adopt the two party Western system of governance?”. The Ambassador replied, unusually curtly, – “You may have been listening but you are not understanding what I am saying”.
The answer is “Never”. The Western democratic model has no role to play in China in the rest of the 21st Century.
Here we are back to former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s New Year Resolution on 1 January 2020 when he encouraged people to understand China from China’s perspective.
The West wants to believe that China’s increasingly consumerist society will transfer economic rights into “one man one vote” and the adoption of the Westminster system of governance.
China is writing new norms of interaction between economic development + political change but one constant factor is the leading role of the Party. Difficult for Western democrats to accept, I know, but better to see China as it is and not as you want.
