Chinese democracy makes people masters of country

China's whole-process people's democracy is a kind of high-quality democracy in which the people are masters of the country, Chinese experts said at a webinar on the quality of democracy on Friday.

The event was led by the China Society for Human Rights Studies and hosted by Northwest University of Political Science and Law's Research Center for Human Rights in Xi'an, Shaanxi province.

Yang Zongke, president of NWUPL, said the political development path and democratic model a country chooses depend on its historical and cultural traditions as well as its level of economic and social development.

To judge whether a country is democratic or not, the key lies in "whether the people are truly masters of the country", he added.

Ou Shujun, an associate professor at the School of International Studies of Renmin University of China in Beijing, said the key for a political community to avoid political decline and obtain political order is not the form of democracy, but the quality of democracy.

Qian Jinyu, executive deputy director of the Research Center for Human Rights of the NWUPL, said based on its own democratic practice, China creatively put forward the concept of whole-process people's democracy, which recognizes the diversity of human democracy.

Zhang Shiwei, a professor at the School of Political Science and Public Administration, NWUPL, said people's democracy led by the proletariat has made fundamental innovations in concept, system and practice.

"It has realized the essence of the people as masters of their own country and is a kind of high-quality democracy," he said.

Wei Nanzhi, a researcher from the Institute of American Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that in recent years, economic, social and political inequality in the United States has worsened, and the US democracy has increasingly debased into an oligarchy of the minority.

Jiang Yan, a doctor in law from Shanghai Normal University, said the social problems caused by guns have been on the rise in the US, but the government is controlled by the arms dealers and political groups.

Its inaction on gun control has led the US into a vicious cycle of institutional problems with guns, he said, adding that it "has democracy in name but not in reality" in this regard.