By Uncle T Cabin (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2008-05-06 20:28

Every November, when local, presidential, or mid-term, elections roll around in US, there would always be colleagues chatting with me: "You Chinese still can't vote, can you?" I couldn't disagree with them, say 18 years ago, but things slowly changed back home. In the last several years, I started comparing the election systems between China and G7 countries. It is really hard to say which group of people have more freedom to choose their leaders these days, at least on paper.

Chinese are able to elect their local representatives, who go on to elect higher level officials, who go on to elect leaders in the central government. Guess what, Canadians get to elect local member of parliaments, and those Member of Parliaments go on to elect the Prime Minister who is the leader of the party that wins most seats in the parliament. The system works not much differently from China. Take the similar comparison around G7 countries, one would see pretty much the same degree of freedom, give or take.

By its constitution, China has a communist party that is outside and above the election. Britain and Japan has royal families who do not go through election process either. In addition, Canada and Australia have governor-generals along with the British crown that rule them all, and do not even remotely go through the election process. France also has president and Prime Minister just like China… I am not a politician and I don't understand French. At the end of the day, when I am not on the job and arrive at home, all I know is that casting a vote in China has pretty much the same effect as casting a vote in G7 countries. Does my vote affect job creation, standard of living, economy, or even the gas price? Hardly. And let's don't bring up the "Olympic group competition for political leadership" again.

But democracy in the West is mature, well known and well branded. My friends and relatives back in China would tell me from time to time, "it's good that there are democratic countries out there in the West. They almost serve as opposition parties for China, since we don't have one". I said "OK", thinking, "you actually have poor and rich sectors in the Communist Party now, that is good for different opinions, like having Democrats and Republicans". But who wants to dash the hope of those people wishing democracy will bring them better days ahead. My folks back in China would sometimes tell me "We don't trust the media, because they always tell us what the government wants them to say". They sometimes point out: "Look at all these corruptions going on in" this or that city, this or that province. Again, I didn't want to dash their high expectation for a true democratic society, but I know the governor of New York or the mayor of Detroit also got into scandals, and I have watched "fleecing of America" regularly, heard complaints about abuses of power higher up all the way to Nixon, Bush and Cheney. The difference is: people in the West believe corruptions were not caused by their government, but people in China believe corruptions were planned and carried out by their government. Objectively, I say "no comment" to either case, as a journalist.

The differences between media in China and in the West these days are: people in China believe they are brain-washed when it comes to media; People in the democratic West can't believe they are brain-washed. One media has progressed upward and the other one is heading downward in terms of openness and objectivity. It is like warm air merging with cold air in the environment of globalization. Hot air gets colder, cold air gets warmer. It is just the force of nature.

When it comes to reporting China, Western media organizations have been the opposite of "free", "objective" and "unbiased". I say that in the views of Chinese like me, born in China then lived more than twice longer than "7 years in Tibet" both in the East and in the West. The righteousness of Western media are so overbearing and well disguised, it makes Joseph Goebbels look like a pupil in the ever advancing science of propaganda and public relations.

For years and years, I kept on reading the word "Taiwan" immediately followed by "a renegade province regarded by China, which should be taken by force if necessary". OK, I got it, I got it, I got it. I asked my English teacher whether repetition was considered a grammatical mistake in English too, like it is in Chinese. He said "yes". Apparently the highly trained and highly capable journalists in Western media organizations like CNN are not afraid of making elementary school level mistakes when talking about China. Or is it because they do not have much more to say about the island of Taiwan and resorted to plagiarism among colleagues to degrade the profession of journalism into a "trade of meeting the challenge of filling blank spaces".

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