Chinese interactive democracy

Xiaoming Guo
2 min readMay 10, 2022

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Chinese government is a People’s Democratic Dictatorship. According to the Chinese Constitution, the government is operating according to the principle of Centralized Democracy. The Centralized Democracy is an interactive democracy. The government is not passively executing whatever the parliament rules and the Prime Minister dictates. The government has to reach out to the grass-root to find out what the people need and want so as to formulate the public policy. When they carried out the government policies, they also sought feedback from the grass root and refine the policies. It is an Iterative and incremental democratic process. As a result, the grass root of the people and the government are perpetually in interactions to refine the government policies, making the policies evolves incrementally.

Western democracy, on the other hand, can only hear the voice of the voters every 4 years. Once the election passed, the grass-root lost control of the policy formation process, getting in name what the politician promised but not what they expected during the election campaign. As a result, Western democracy makes government policy change abruptly, such as Obama Care that overthrown by Tramp.

In the west, the grass root of the party discusses and proposes policies. The policies proposed by the grass-root were distorted during the party convention. The policies formed in the convention were ignored by the caucus on the House Floor. The legislative process is influenced more by lobbyists than by the party grass root. A campaign slogan becomes two thousand pages of documents, with legal jargon protecting all the interest groups. The bill passed in parliament is then distorted in the execution by the executive branches. The people suffered all the side effects of the unintended consequences, swallowing the consequence as “what they want” in the election, while interest groups guarded and expanded their interest in whatever directions policy changes.

Chinese interactive democracy is a much more effective democracy than western democracy.

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Xiaoming Guo
Xiaoming Guo

Written by Xiaoming Guo

Ph.D. from McGill University. MBA from Queen’s University. A patriot Canadian believes that a good relationship with China serves our best national interest.

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