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Democracy Talks: How the Concept of Minzhu Zhuyi Is Discussed in Official and Online Fora in Mainland China

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Democracy Talks: How the Concept of Minzhu Zhuyi Is Discussed in Official and Online Fora in Mainland China Democracy Talks: How the concept of minzhu zhuyi is discussed in official and online fora in Mainland China Marco Basile S2893223 Supervisor: Florian Schneider MA Thesis 1 July 2021 Asian Studies: Politics, Society and Economy of Asia, Leiden University Wordcount: 14,981 1 Table of Contents 1. Chapter 1: Introducing minzhu..............................................................................................3 2. Chapter 2: Literature Review: Chinese and Online Democracy ...................................................................................................................................6 2.1 CCP-led minzhu.....................................................................................................................6 2.2 Minzhu through the cyberspace...........................................................................................7 3. Chapter 3: Official Discourses...............................................................................................10 3.1 Defining Discourse: Approaches, Foucault, Politics..........................................................................................................................................10 3.2 Mao Zedong and His “New Democracy”...................................................................................................................................12 3.3 Denghist minzhu: Between Tradition and Progress........................................................................................................................................13 3.4 Jiang: Pragmatism still in Charge.......................................................................................14 3.5 The Hu-Wen leadership: New Possibilities for Minzhu?........................................................................................................................................15 3.6 Xi: Chinese-style Democracy Comes Full Circle ...........................................................................................................................................16 4. Chapter 4: Minzhu & Weibo: Online Democracy Talks.............................................................................................................................................20 4.1 Methodology..........................................................................................................................20 4.2 Analysis..................................................................................................................................21 4.2.1 American Democracy vs. Chinese Minzhu, or “Democracy is not Coca- Cola”............................................................................................................................................22 4.2.2 Foreign commentaries..............................................................................................................................27 4.2.3 Chinese-style Democracy?.................................................................................................................................34 5. Chapter 5: Conclusion ...........................................................................................................41 6. Bibliography............................................................................................................................43 2 Chapter 1: Introducing minzhu When debates of China’s current and future prospects ensue outside of the country, many elements are repeatedly brought to the fore: the expansion of the middle class (Ji, 2020; Cheng, 2019), GDP growth (Bloomberg News, 2021), its relations with the United States (Wong, 2021), its military expansion (Rogin, 2020), and many more. Among them, democracy represents one theme that, due to its often sentimentally charged nature, is prevalent in these discussions. Its relevance informs the entirety of my thesis, as I ask the following research questions: how have Chinese political elites shaped the concept of minzhu zhuyi in their discursive practices? How have young online users on the Twitter-like Weibo expressed minzhu zhuyi in their blogposts? Finally, how do these blogposts relate to the discursive practices of the Communist Party? Long before the opening of the country to foreign markets in 1978, people outside of China have been approaching the concept of a “Democratic China” with hopes that the country would once and for all conform to Western liberal ideals of the modern nation. Western debates centered on Chinese democracy have been notoriously characterized by a striking polarization. When engaging in Chinese futurology, academics often see China as either the next democratic powerhouse (see Callahan, 2013, p. 1), or as an irredeemable “bastion of authoritarianism” (see Perry, 2015, p. 904). While one could argue that the truth can be located somewhere in the middle of these two diametrically different positions, I would like to propose a different movement: a movement that shifts discourses on China’s future from the outside to the inside of China. In doing so, I believe that we may better understand how the Chinese populace relates to the idea of democracy. Accordingly, from this point on I have mostly discarded the word “democracy”—at least when it comes to purely Chinese contexts. Instead, I have used more frequently the Mandarin translation of the word: minzhu zhuyi (民主主义). The present thesis is constituted by a starting chapter that deals with the overall existing literature on the concept of minzhu zhuyi as expressed by official and online discourses. The literature review focuses on how scholars have previously approached the government’s rendition of minzhu zhuyi in Mainland China. The common theme of these articles is that they examine the definitional and linguistic choices that elites make in discourse-construction and narrative-building. Additionally, academic works on the internet’s role in shaping political identities among the Chinese youth— especially in the case of Weibo—have been explored. 3 A third, longer chapter focusing entirely on the official side of the narrative follows: this section explores the historical definition of minzhu zhuyi in Mainland China through a relatively short commentary on the words and actions of major Party figures from 1949 up to our present day. The key features of their stance on minzhu are obtained through the discourses, and analyses thereof, of the main leaders that have been at the helm of the Party since the founding of the PRC in 1949: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao together with Wen Jiabao1, and Xi Jinping. While other illustrious figures have also had much to say about this subject, I have attempted to zero in on the words of those that had the strongest authority over the official political thought of the CCP throughout the last seventy years. The fourth chapter turns the attention to the examination of discussions on minzhu zhuyi by internet users on the popular platform known as Weibo. Here I finally explore the public side of the debate. To do so, I employed content analysis to review the posts and comments written by users on the popular Sina Weibo (新浪微博), a microblogging-based website with a monthly active user base of around 523 million (as of the third quarter of 2020; Thomala, 2020), and second only to the social media giant WeChat (微信) (DeGennaro, 2019; Thomala, 2020; Chernavina, 2021). A final section then follows, which combines the above findings, and present a clearer image of the relationship between official, and unofficial, virtual Democracy talks. This thesis is of a rather descriptive nature, since it sets out to outline the core, and edges, of the discourse on minzhu zhuyi in Mainland China through the combined words of elite officials and everyday internet users. However, its aim is not just to describe: my goal here is to deepen the awareness and knowledge of the Chinese-side of the narrative on democracy and China, and democracy in China. What I believe my findings here will bring to the current field of studies on Chinese democracy boils down to essentially two aspects. First is a holistic approach to how CCP’s main figures—from Mao to Xi—have talked about, and dealt with, minzhu zhuyi. The term has appeared quite often in the words and lines of Party leaders through the decades; therefore, it deserves a more careful analysis. Second, this thesis provides an investigation into Weibo’s role as a “(limited) public sphere in China” (Bolsover, 2018, p. 454) that goes beyond traditional studies on Chinese internet speech and delves deeper into the particular of minzhu zhuyi talks. It does so by introducing the study of the blogposts written by young users on Weibo. Finally, I believe a holistic approach that combines the official and the unofficial, online side of the debate goes beyond the 1 As seen in Chapter 3, Wen Jiabao was particularly vocal about minzhu as a prime minister during the Hu Jintao leadership, so much so that any analysis of Hu’s stance vis-à-vis minzhu cannot ignore his contributions to the topic, despite the fact he was a secondary figure of his leadership generation. 4 limits of presenting only one of the two, and it allows for a more complex, and satisfying, image of the discourse on Chinese democracy. 5 Chapter 2 Literature Review: Chinese and Online Democracy This chapter explores first the existing literature on minzhu zhuyi in relation to the Party’s stance on the subject, and its attempts at shaping the discourse in a way that fits China’s political
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