Opinion | Which is the world's best political party?
By Philip Yeung, university teacher
PKY480@gmail.com
The answer will knock your socks off. Are you ready for the unvarnished truth?
It is not American or British and certainly not Brazilian parties.
It is the Communist Party of China (CPC).
With nearly 96 million members, in size, the CPC is the largest. In longevity, at 100 years old, it ranks third. But in delivering the goods, China's party wins by a country mile.
Forget the labels and the lies, China's party has outperformed its Western counterparts. As access to truth is a democratic right, I intend to exercise it to ward off America's falsehoods.
We seldom judge a country by the party that runs it. Maybe we should.
Don't judge parties by what they say or call themselves, but by what they do and deliver.
The CPC has been a favorite target for Western hate. The US, wielding its multimedia and military might, has hijacked the narrative. Will truth ever emerge unfiltered?
Good parties grow into greatness. Bad parties degenerate into petty partisanship and even immorality.
For the downtrodden, the CPC is their best hope on the horizon, and reward for honest effort. Its leadership has inspired noble acts of charity.
When floods ravaged Henan province, ERKE, a sportswear giant donated relief aid worth 50 million yuan despite bleeding red ink. Moved by this noble act, customers spontaneously poured into its stores to rescue its struggling business. This is the new China, where corporate compassion supports socialist care.
Today's Republican Party is no longer the party of Lincoln and UK's Conservative Party is no longer the party of Churchill. The CPC, to its credit, is no longer the party of the Cultural Revolution. It has cross-fertilized Confucian universal humanism with socialist altruism and capitalist wealth creation. The result is a hybrid socialism with Chinese characteristics.
There's no party like the CPC, and no country like China. It's the 3-P party: the party of peace, prosperity and purpose. Trump's Party, by contrast, has become known as the 3-P apparatus: populism, polarization and post-truth.
CPC is the engine of positive change. A Canadian teacher after living in China for 22 years says "When I return to my home town, year after year, nothing changes, no new bridges or roads or high-speed trains, just the same old buildings. Time stands still. It stagnates, luxuriating in laziness. But China has a restless energy and is forever reinventing itself." She adds, "Don't read the newspapers, if you want to know China." By "newspapers", she means Western press which sell their papers by bad-mouthing a country in love with itself.
The deliberate misrepresentations of China constitute the most evil misunderstanding of the 21st century. The force for universal good is painted as a scourge, though it has lowered their cost of living. America, the emperor with no clothes, is telling the world to unsee what they have seen.
By far, the most serious miscalculation is treating the CPC as if it were in opposition to its people. The two subserve each other. War with the Chinese government means total war with its people.
China's governance model works like magic. Its purchasing power has reached parity with the US, if not surpassed it.
The tale of two cities shows its magic: Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Thirty years ago, the former was a sleepy backwater. Today, it is the Silicon Valley of the East, whose GDP has overtaken Hong Kong's, with the latter dragged down by the false promise of unfettered freedom, consumed by politics, plunged into violent chaos, losing its luster as a civil society, polarized and paralyzed by politics.
Politics has brought Hong Kong nothing but pain, with rule of law and economic vitality undermined by agents of "democracy". In 9 chaotic months, this once glittering city became a toxic swamp, thanks to dysfunctional "democracy". An overabundance of politics has brought Hong Kong to its knees.
Across the border in Shenzhen, they talk and walk progress—with no obsession over who votes for whom. The story of Shenzhen is the story of China writ large.
China needs no lectures on how to govern. The apprentice has outperformed the purported master. China is the future—breathtaking infrastructure, sleek high-speed trains and lifting 800 million people out of grinding poverty. In America, bridges are crumbling, homelessness is spreading, and cost of living skyrocketing. For the poor, the choice is to eat or heat.
This is good governance in a nutshell. The multi-year Harvard study says 93% of Chinese trust their government—unimaginable elsewhere.
Stop talking about "liberating" the Chinese from "oppression". Americans themselves need liberation from street crimes, hate crimes, police and gun violence against colored people, with mad-dog Trump running unleashed and unneutered. What good is democracy without safety?
The CPC has engineered China's miraculous metamorphosis. Now a party of ultra-rationality, collective responsibility and executive efficiency, it is run like a corporate board, answerable for its collective decisions and outcomes. Learning from the past and the best, it makes good governance a habit.
Unlike western parties, the CPC is not a party of vested interests or the projection of one-man's ego. It is collectively driven by the country's common destiny.
Parties degenerate over time. Republicans are obsessing about not losing their whiteness, peddling its Replacement Theory, allowing an unhinged megalomaniac to steal the soul of the Party. Now populated by red-necks and extremists, it is in a race to the bottom.
Western parties often work at cross purposes, with the ruling party undoing what its predecessor has done. Even a settled law protecting abortion rights is not off-limits.
Two things define the CPC: discipline and mission. Its members behave like board members, safeguarding the interests of common people not shareholders. Its latest Code of Conduct spells out 15 requirements for party members. If you break the rules, you pay the price. By contrast, John Major issued his famous 7 Behavior Principles to curb sleaze in his party—with vague impotent concepts such as Integrity and Objectivity—to no avail. Scandals continued to rattle. Republicans pass laws to prevent non-whites from voting. Stacking the Supreme Court with unsackable judges has taken democracy out of the equation. With a 6-3 Republican stranglehold, non-partisan democracy is dead.
In Britain, the Tory Party was, for three years, the private preserve of law-breaking, man-child Boris.
In Australia, its ex-prime minister Scott Morrison, secretly appointed himself to five ministries, practically making himself the Minister-of-Everything, giving himself absolute authority in secrecy.
Among America, Britain and Australia, one was dominated by a dangerous buffoon, the second by an unruly "moral vacuum" and the third by a closet autocrat. So much for the glory of liberal democracies.
If Trump, Boris or Morrison were ever to seek CPC membership, they need not apply.
In Hong Kong, a 70-seat legislature is splintered into 12 parties plus numerous political fringe groups outside the chamber. Europe with its dizzying array of political parties, is cursed with rotating minority governments.
If you judge a party by its ability to get things done for its people, the CPC has no equal.
The party for the underdog and common folks, it has awesome powers of mobilization and long-term planning to correct social wrongs. In this, the CPC stands alone.
America is using the CPC as a bogeyman. Likewise, Britain. Both need China as a convenient distraction from their domestic failures.
Demonization is a tiresome fool's game. Smearing a party of peace and prosperity upends global stability. There ought to be a court where a political party could sue for libel. If you libel the CPC, you libel the people of China. As for the Republicans and Tories, history will judge them harshly.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
Read more articles by Philip Yeung:
Opinion | What an unforgivable insult to China and its civilization!
Opinion | America’s incurable China complex
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