For China Media Project, David Bandurski writes about the frequently-heard argument that Chinese people aren’t interested in politics and don’t have much use for democracy:
If I had a jiao for every time someone’s told me the Chinese don’t care about politics or democracy, I’d have enough chunk change to fund an American presidential campaign. “The new middle class is young, rich and happy. Just don’t mention politics,” Time reported not long ago. And we are elsewhere informed that “new-generation Chinese”, who exist in a “parallel universe,” “do not want democracy.”
…The answer, the oft-neglected missing piece, is expression. These assumptions about the Chinese and their shallowest convictions fail to account for the salient fact that real dialogue about politics or civic life is now and has historically been suppressed in China. Speech, the basic condition of public participation in political affairs, is something the Communist Party has historically monopolized.
So while it’s basically true that politics and democracy are not readily discernible topics in China, it’s more to the point to say that China is a one-party state that does not tolerate political debate.
Just as the factor of speech is missing from these calculations about the political insouciance of the Chinese people, speech may also be the key to reading China’s political future. [Full text]
