China says it's running on a new version of democracy that doesn't rely on elections. Experts say it's just another mind game.

• Since 2021, China has been promoting the idea that it runs a new version of democracy.
• The concept is to avoid elections but to consult common people on how the country should run.

China is having a field day with former UK Prime Minister Lizz Truss' resignation.

On Weibo, China's heavily censored version of Twitter, the hashtag "Prime Minister Truss resigns" is flush with comments of glee and ridicule. As of Thursday, it had been seen more than 360 million times.

But the jeering goes deeper than race-against-lettuce memes. On Weibo, it's not just Truss and her economic plan that are the butt of the joke — the mockery also extends to the very political system that governs the West.

Beijing has in recent years stepped up its criticism of "Western democracy," deriding it as a "game of the rich" and downplaying the fairness of elections. Whenever a controversial leader makes headlines, Weibo users rarely give up the chance to needle the system under which Donald Trumps and Jair Bolsonaros come to power.

President Xi Jinping offers an ideological alternative. He first introduced the term "whole-process democracy" to China in a 2019 speech. Chinese media explained that it was an answer to a Western system in which politicians focus only on promises and winning races instead of governing.

By 2021, the idea had taken Chinese state media by storm. People's Daily, the main state outlet, had only mentioned the term once before July 2021, according to the China Media Project, a Hong Kong-based non-profit that tracks Chinese media trends. However, by November that year, "whole-process democracy" was mentioned in 128 People's Daily articles, per CMP.

The official definition of the term is vague. "China's whole-process people's democracy integrates process-oriented democracy with results-oriented democracy, procedural democracy with substantive democracy, direct democracy with indirect democracy and people's democracy with the will of the state," says China's white paper on the subject, per CGTN.

Semantics aside, a key point to note is that "whole-process democracy" plays down the need for elections. Instead, it allows its citizens to exercise their will by submitting opinions or directly influencing government policy and decisions through surveys, according to Beijing.

It's still not clear how successful the implementation of "whole process democracy" has been, but political scientists studying China told Insider that the system doesn't really represent a change in how Beijing governs.

Rather, it's being used to alter the reputation of China's political system to become one that's on par with the West's and listens to its citizens — a sign that Beijing's leaders are learning from the mistakes of past administrations.

Listening to the people?

China's plans for whole-process democracy started taking shape in June. Xi announced that Beijing had gathered online opinions from 8.54 million citizens in April and May "to contribute ideas to the country's development and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation."

Xi tied the survey to this year's 20th National Congress, where China's top leadership for the next five years is confirmed. It sets the stage for what Xi's likely third term — unprecedented since Mao Zedong's rule — as China's supreme leader might look like.

There are no details on what people actually suggested to the Communist party, but Rana Mitter, a professor of the history and politics of modern China at Oxford University, told Insider that Beijing likely did obtain the millions of responses from citizens as it claimed.

"The question is: What level of quality of information is being gauged? What were the circumstances in which opinions were gathered? How open and robust and anonymized was the process?" he said. "How free were people to give their thoughts?"

Ian Chong, who teaches political science at the National University of Singapore, said China has a history of claiming to consult its people, but that this has been limited in practice.

"As Mao consolidated power, consultativeness became a means to weed out opponents," Chong told Insider, referring to Mao Zedong, who led China from 1949 to 1976. Mao infamously encouraged educated individuals to air their views on his policies in 1956, then launched a campaign to arrest, expel, or execute critics the following year.

"When there's opinion polling done in authoritarian settings, you often get people responding that they 'don't know' or 'they have no opinion' on various issues," Chong said.

"8.5 million people is a large number of people but a tiny proportion of China's population," Chong noted. "It's not even 10% of China's Communist Party members. Who is within this 8.5 million and what is the degree to which they're allowed to speak their mind?"

Redefining democracy, sort of

If building a form of "democracy" sounds uncharacteristic of Beijing, that's because the modern conversation around communism and democracy has only focused on the last three decades, Mitter said.

"The last 30 years has been, in historical terms, an unusual period in which there has been quite a wide range of electoral democracies lined up against a relatively smaller number of authoritarian states," he said. "And it's been possible to define the two as opposed to each other."

In the early to mid-20th century, many nations and communities were still debating the definition of democracy. Today, many associate democracies with elections, but some governments in past decades tried to tie democracy more to other civil liberties like freedom of speech or freedom of assembly, Mitter said.

"And it's that confusion that I think China is now using to try and redefine its own version of what it's doing," he said.

Mitter said Xi's approach is better defined as "consultative Leninism," a term coined by Professor Steve Tsang of the SOAS University of London, and not a version of democracy.

Chong said Beijing is committing more to conjuring its own version of democracy so it can present China's government as more attractive in terms of participation — so long as it doesn't involve elections.

"This current Chinese regime and Xi generally frown upon competitive elections," Chong said. "They don't like that level of uncertainty and risk that comes with elections because it can be a more direct threat to people at the apex of power."

Since 1988, China has tried small-scale elections that allow villagers to select their community leaders, but the program fell to the wayside after Beijing smashed a series of pro-democracy protests in 2011.

Meanwhile, increased restrictions on village-level democracy and on Hong Kong under Xi's rule indicate his administration is apprehensive about allowing citizens to exercise their popular will, Chong said.

As for why China is trying to sell the idea of a democracy, that's because democracies are generally looked upon favorably by people, Chong added.

"It's like saying you support good. Everybody would say that they do," he said.

That's not to say that China is abandoning talk of Marxism-Leninism, which is still core to China's politics, Mitter said.

"The Chinese Communist Party has been quite effective in finding language that enables it to find whatever policy is helpful to that particular moment," he said.

Keeping information flowing in

According to Mitter, China's survey and its idea of whole-process democracy shows that Beijing is aware of the need to adapt and listen to its citizens.

"The Chinese Communist Party is very concerned to make sure that, unlike say the Communist Party of the Soviet Union back in the 70s and 80s, it does not lose power," Mitter said.

"And it understands that if it wants to hold onto its existing power, then it has to be flexible in terms of its governance mechanisms within the boundaries of keeping an absolute grip on one-party power," he added.

Key to this is keeping the government informed of its citizens' attitudes and realities on the ground, Mitter said.

"One of the ultimate periods of low information flow was back in the 1950s during the Great Leap Forward, when Chinese officials were having to forge and falsify production figures on cereals, grains, and so forth to suit production quotas," he said.

The Great Leap Forward was a radical five-year plan in which Mao tasked all farming households with also producing steel. The disastrous policy resulted in 30 million people dying of starvation, but by the time the policy was introduced, Mao's critics had mostly been eradicated.

Conversely, China saw an economic boom in the 1980s after its then-leader Deng Xiaoping revived an emphasis on discerning "truth from facts," allowing more topics on politics and growth to be discussed, Mitter said.

"The other situation I think you have is in North Korea, where basically nobody can say anything at all," he said. "It's very difficult to monitor that opinion."

Mitter noted that while China has become notorious for internet censorship under Xi, authorities generally allow some issues to bubble up on social media so they can understand what people are concerned about.

Chong said that as social media continues to dominate China's discussion space, it's likely the average Chinese person's ability to engage with Beijing will increasingly depend on whether they have internet access.

Around 70% of China's people use the internet, per World Bank data, but that still leaves 400 million in the country — more people than in the US — who don't have regular online access.

Even so, Chong said, whole-process democracy might still help the CCP give the impression that it cares about the average citizen.

"In exchange for increased prosperity and wealth, people accept the CCP's perpetual rule and don't challenge it," Chong said.

With China's economy facing headwinds amid the pandemic and a trade war with the US, Beijing may be under pressure to show citizens that they're listening to them.

"It does help lend a sheen of legitimacy. Perhaps it's something that Xi finds useful," he said.