Chinese-style Democracy as a Political Project for Meaning-Construction: Old Wine in a New Bottle?

Abstract

Drawn from the textual data in the online and printed media from mainland China and Hong Kong, this article aims to identify and feature how Chinese-style democracy is constructed by engaging in discourse analysis, arguing that China-style democracy is not a political experiment aiming to critically reflect upon the weaknesses of democracy in conceptual and procedural aspects, and not a creative project focusing on how the Chinese experiences can refresh and reframe the conventional wisdom. Instead, it is a meaning-construction project surrounding the following themes explored: (1) negative Western democracy versus positive Chinese-style democracy in terms of efficiency, (2) Western democracy as the symbol of political failure, such as street politics, domestic struggles, chaos, (3) positivity of Chinese-style democracy with China’s rise brought by reform and opening-up since 1978, and (4) perverting the language of Western democracy to construct Chinese-style democracy, such as rule of law, human rights. Specialty, uniqueness and adaption, in the main, are the common ground during the process of meaning reconstruction, with the intention to conduct the political performance for an undemocratic, illiberal and autocratic regime.

Keywords

• Chinese-style democracy
• Western democracy
• stability
• efficiency
• street politics
• discourse analysis