Chongqing- Alex, a reporter with iChongqing hosted a roundtable talk with Professor Zhang Weiwei and Mr. Daniel Dumbrill recently in Chonqing.
Professor Zhang is Dean of the China Institute at Fudan University, and he has written extensively in English and Chinese on China's economic and political reform, China's development model, and comparative politics. In the mid-1980s, he worked as a senior English interpreter for Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders. During his academic studies career, he was a senior fellow in the Centre for Asian Studies at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and a visiting professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations.
As a Canadian businessman, and content creator, Daniel Dumbrill has been living in China for years, Shenzhen, Hongkong, and now Chongqing. Daniel Dumbrill is well known in the YouTube community for his in-depth interviews with fellow scholars.
The topic of the round table was Democracy In China. In episode 1, Professor Zhang Weiwei says that the term democracy was first registered in the West, and he describes this as a procedure of democracy. Still, China has adopted a different approach which is substantive democracy. Meanwhile, China's consultative democracy is doing much better than any other country, this is within the Chinese culture. The consultative practice is from the central government down to the grassroots. With several consultations, people can reach a consensus and move the nation forward.
Daniel Dumbrill says China doesn't adopt the multi-party system, so the people don't have these factions that allow a society to become distracted by fighting each other, the Chinese government is responsible to the people, and they have to answer the problems that come up. Every system has its positives and negatives, no one system's right for everybody, but China's system works quite well. The world needs to think if they want China to have a system like the West.