China's whole-process democracy stands out with characteristics, strength, says Brazilian legal expert

RIO DE JANEIRO -- The big test of social governance brought by the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the characteristics and strength of China's whole-process democracy, Brazilian legal expert Evandro Carvalho has said.

"Containing the pandemic and recovering the economy is the result of the combination of the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the state's capacity for action and the people's awareness of solidarity in confronting the pandemic," said the law professor at Brazil's Getulio Vargas Foundation, an economic think tank, in a recent interview with Xinhua.

"The party, state and people, united around a single objective -- that is, containing the pandemic -- showed the strength of the Chinese model of social and political organization," Carvalho added.

Carvalho used to be a visiting scholar at the Center for BRICS Studies at Shanghai's Fudan University, during which he had an up-close look at China's democratic practices. In his eyes, the whole-process democracy is a hallmark of China's socialist democracy, which is "not only a democracy in form, but in substance."

"Such democracy is not limited to the democratic decision-making process, but also focuses on its outcome," he noted.

The institutional arrangements of China's democracy involve not only procedural aspects but public participation, which aim to find solutions to actual problems that people are experiencing, according to the scholar.

The democratic channel is for grasping what people want and what a government needs to do, Carvalho stressed, saying that the CPC fully understands people's wishes to partake in politics and builds the national unity into a society's common will, with the CPC symbolizing such a unity, he said.

Placing his research focus on the development of democracy and the rule of law in China, Carvalho plans to soon publish a monograph on relevant topic. In his opinion, socialism with Chinese characteristics has gone through a developing process that aligns more with Chinese culture and national conditions.

Some Westerners don't know much about China's reality and are filled with "ideological prejudice" or "anti-China political agendas," Carvalho said, describing the phenomenon as an "intellectual disorder."

"To understand China, one must analyze it from a Chinese perspective," he added.

Through a series of institutional arrangements, the whole-process democracy enables the true interconnection of democratic elections, consultations, decision-making, management and oversight.

"Unlike several Western democracies that are increasingly alienating the people from the political process and ignoring their needs, the Chinese government wants, with the use of technology, to listen more to the population and monitor the execution of the measures to meet the needs of the people," he said.

He noted that last August, during the planning and preparing of the 14th Five-Year Plan, the Chinese government took a great number of suggestions from numerous public feedbacks via the Internet, illustrating a high level of public participation.

"China is building a democracy with Chinese characteristics that will perhaps involve more public participation and be more connected to the reality and interests of the people than many Western democracies," said Carvalho.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of Qiushi Journal.