Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
public propaganda campaigns and in political harangues by Party
spokespersons.
But enlightened intellectuals and Party members already know that
democracy is the wave of the future for China. Zhao Ziyang, the high
Communist Party official who was cashiered and put under house
arrest for the rest of his life for opposing Deng Xiaoping's bloody Tia-
nanmen Massacre on June 4, 1989, forcefully came to this realization
during the last two decades of his life. His comments on parliamentary
democracy in his recently discovered political memoirs are coura-
geously forthright, trenchant, and prescient:
I once believed that people were the masters of their own affairs not in
the parliamentary democracies of the developed nations in the West,
but only in the Soviet and socialist nations' systems with a people's
congress, making the latter system more advanced and a better-
realized form of democracy.
This, in fact, is not the case. The democratic systems of our socialist
nations are all just superficial; they are not systems in which the people
are in charge, but rather are ruled by a few or even a single person
...
In fact, it is the Western parliamentary democratic system that has
demonstrated the most vitality. This system is currently the best one
available. It is able to manifest the spirit of democracy and meet the
demands of a modern society, and it is a relatively mature system
...
In the past few decades, the newly emerging nations with their fast-
paced development have illustrated more clearly the trend to converge
on a parliamentary democratic system. I am certain this is not by chance.
Why is there not even one developed nation practicing any other sys-
tem? This shows that if a country wants to modernize, to realize a
modern market economy, it must practice parliamentary democracy as
its political system
...
Given current conditions in China, we must establish that the final
goal of political reform is the realization of this advanced political system.
(Zhao 2009, 269-70)
During the course of their Meiji Restoration in the late nineteenth
century, the Japanese had already realized the universal applicability
of Western-style parliamentary democracy. In the words of Taguchi
Ikichi (1855-1905), an influential Meiji-era economist and essayist,
“We study physics, psychology, economics, and the other sciences
notbecausetheWestdiscoveredthem,butbecausetheyaretheuni-
versal truth. We seek to establish constitutional government in our
country [Japan] not because it is a Western form of government, but
because it conforms with man's own nature” (Pyle 1969, 90). The large
