Obviously US has its own version of democracy that is quite different from UK's, both countries are the beacons of democracy that the west has been advocating for the past few hundreds of years. If China decides now to pick a leaf from UK's book and a few from US's book to carve out its own version of governance, why it must mean "going backward"? It is quite self-righteous and self-centric.
I have said this in the past -- that democracy is both a goal and a process. There has to be a balance of both in order for the country to be assigned the label ' a democracy'.
For instance...China allows voting, but does not allow competing parties, whereas, in the Western countries, the communist parties by large is allowed to compete for the ideological and political allegiance of the people. You might call our allowance 'extreme' but from our perspective, that 'extreme' is what make us 'democratic'.Take the other extreme of North Korea or the once East Germany. Both has 'Democratic' in their countries' names but no one, not even a Chinese party ideologue, would say with a straight face that those two countries are anything 'democratic'.
So it is not so much a 'version of governance' but the 'degree of democratic practices'. A term limit is a feature of the democratic process because supposedly the imposition came from the people. Did that happened in China? If the official answer is 'Yes', then the inevitable question is 'Did the abrogation of term limit also came from the people?'
The label 'the people' is not to be restricted to Party members, at least not by our standards of democratic practices. The label 'the people' implies a political affiliation with the government and the country, aka 'citizenship', and a citizen is someone independent of party affiliation. A US citizen can be a member of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), not just the Republican or the Democratic parties.
So if the abrogation of term limit came from the Party and not the Chinese people at large, then by our definition of democracy, you cannot use your argument to describe China as a different version of democracy in the same vein as how the US and the UK are different in practice and can still call ourselves 'democracies'.
CCP's proposal was not a total shock to me, knowing the kind of person Xi is. I am neither for nor against this move, but would rather wait for a decade to see if Xi can justify his extraordinary move. He has a sense of mission and he may just be the person who can accomplish the biggest "Chinese Dream", the final unification of China, for a billion plus Chinese.
Xi may be a strongman, but he is not a corrupt party boss the west media made him out to be. Among 87 million CCP members, there ought to be some who are clean and who are on a mission, Xi may just be both.
Then like Mr. Mike asked earlier...You are saying that out of 80-something million, only one is honest? But then again, I did gave Xi the benefit of the doubt back on post 104 page 7.
A term limit is one bulwark against the
ODDS of corruption. I said 'odds', implying a potentiality, not yet happening. Am not saying outright that Xi is corrupt. But the fact that there was a term limit in the Chinese Constitution clearly implied that: "Regardless of what is your perceived character, we are not going to allow you even the potentiality of you being corrupted."
Barack Obama may be a righteous man in the eyes of God and may have been at worst inept at some points in his presidency, but the 22nd Amendment basically said to him: "Screw you and your dream of a 3rd term."
If a person is corrupt, then at least the 22nd will prevent him/her from getting worse, assuming the American public has not removed him/her before the first term. A possibility The Orange One is worried about right now.
China still has a lot of internal problems, not merely issues. There is a short video titled
'Down From The Mountain' that painfully illustrate the plight of China's 'left behind children'. The military destruction of Taiwan will have no effects on these children. Further, North Korea is more of a threat to China than Taiwan is. The threat is indirect but no less damaging than if a bomb explodes in downtown Beijing. Internal corruption is more of a threat to state stability and integrity than Taiwan is a threat militarily. The reality is that if you go down the list of problems in terms of urgency of resolution and degree of difficulty of resolution, Taiwan would be at the bottom of that list.