Communist paper lashes Western-style democracy

BEIJING (AP):

China's Communist Party newspaper issued a scathing attack on Western-style democracy yesterday amid growing calls for reform of the country's political system and a resulting push-back by party conservatives.

The People's Daily editorial is the latest in a flurry of attacks on Western political institutions to appear in party propaganda organs in recent weeks.

Those follow bold calls for unspecified political reforms from Premier Wen Jiabao, as well as the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize this month to imprisoned Chinese dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, who had urged an end to single-party rule.

Separation unsuited for china

The People's Daily editorial blasted concepts such as multiparty democracy and separation of powers as unsuited to China, and praised the country's authoritarian socialist system as the best way of concentrating resources and accomplishing major tasks.

Western democracies were founded on colonisation, exploitation and slavery, and would crumble if not for welfare payments to their underprivileged citizens, it said.

"If our country was to indiscriminately copy the Western way, we would lose the foundational thinking of shared struggle, lose the robustness of core leadership, and the country would turn into a sheet of loose sand," the editorial said, using a traditional term for disunity and chaos.