Time to ignore Western critics and promote fruitful policies

Now and then some Western media outlets laugh at China's "fake" democracy. But the inconvenient truth is that for decades Western politicians and pundits alike have continued to deny that China's political system has outperformed their own in every metric that really matters.

Over the past 40 years, since late leader Deng Xiaoping proclaimed the Four Cardinal Principles, China has lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than any other political system in the history of the human race. By contrast, the US and the major European Union countries have been mired in profound, ever-escalating crises of unemployment, economic decay and public violence.

Not coincidentally, these catastrophic domestic failures have been accompanied by wild manic campaigns of aggression against small and ill-equipped countries around the world which are in no position to fight back. China has waged no such aggression. The United States, the United Kingdom and France have unleashed many.

And their victims have included clearly democratic countries such as Ukraine and now Venezuela. Libya, the most prosperous country in Africa in terms of per capita income has turned into an anarchic state ravaged by murderous gangs following the destruction of its established government by US-backed NATO air intervention in 2011.

All the major countries of Western Europe are now mired in dire existential crises. The UK is quite literally dissolving under the impact of the Brexit crisis with a chaotic government that does not seem to have a clue what to do.

Catalonia, the most prosperous province of Spain has actually voted to secede from Spain, while the Madrid government tries to repress it.

The old revered liberal orthodoxies of open borders, free trade and deregulated business have brought havoc and misery. Western governments have abdicated their responsibility to balance the interests of all sections of society and－most of all－to protect the weak and the poor. In traditional Chinese terms, they have clearly forfeited the "mandate of heaven".

Classic Chinese principles were never truly accepted by the minimalist liberals of the West from William Gladstone more than a century and a half ago in Britain to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush in the US.

Yet what should be the purpose of democracy? Should it not be that people be better served and protected? And should not effective government for the people also be able to provide a government that can not only decide upon effective and successful policies but also has the will and expertise to implement them for the good of all?

Judged by these criteria, China's governing system has nothing to apologize for when compared with the failing systems of the West. On the contrary, there is much the countries in North America and Western Europe can and should learn from the Chinese example.

Instead, of course, we see that those doomed to fail simply refuse to learn. Leaders throughout Latin America and Africa who seek to learn from China and cultivate close and mutually beneficial prosperous relations with it are, at best, sneered at and more often actively destabilized by Wall Street, the City of London and their predictable cheering galleries.

Feelings of inadequacy, denial and repression emerge anyway as policies of jealousy and hatred. Eventually, world peace itself must be doomed to fall victim to such passions.

In such a world, the Chinese people will do well to ignore their jealous, futile critics and push ahead instead with their own successful principles and policies.

The author is a senior fellow at the American University in Moscow. The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.