A "Dictator Communist" Regime Without Democracy And Freedom

From an article headlined "I don't think US should be the leader of the world"

Yong Tang: The Washington Post often describes China as a dictator communist regime without democracy and freedom. Why is the newspaper so fond of playing with such negative words?

Bennett: I disagree with that. First of all, Neither The Washington Post, nor the New York Times, nor any other big newspapers, refer to China today as a dictatorship regime. We don't use these words on the paper any more. Now we say China is a communist country only because it is a fact. China is ruled by the Communist party.

This is crazy. I suspect Mr. Bennett has been misquoted, or maybe he doesn't read his own newspaper. See Backward in China, an editorial that appeared December 20, 2004

FOR TWO YEARS the outside world has speculated about where Chinese President Hu Jintao would lead his country once he and his team consolidated their hold on power. The answer got clearer last week when his police knocked on the doors of three leading intellectuals who have criticized the government or advocated democratic change. The detentions of Yu Jie, Zhang Zuhua and Liu Xiaobo confirmed the launch of a crackdown on dissent that includes greater censorship of the press and a new campaign by the Communist Party to tighten discipline in its ranks. Rather than dismantle the creaky political dictatorship that governs China's increasingly modern economy, Mr. Hu is headed in the opposite direction.

In China's Donkey Droppings, which appeared December 1, 2004, Nicholas D. Kristof wrote, "I love China, and I share its officials' distaste for those who harm it. That's why I'm angry that hard-liners in Beijing are presenting China to the world as repressive, fragile, tyrannical and backward."

Of course these are opinion pieces, which Bennett could argue are different. However, I suspect the Chinese don't see any difference. Anyway, why does Yong Tang call these "negative words"? Doesn't he like Mao Zedong?

"You are dictatorial." My dear sirs, you are right, that is just what we are. All the experience the Chinese people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforce the people's democratic dictatorship, that is, to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right.

Who are the people? At the present stage in China, they are the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. These classes, led by the working class and the Communist Party, unite to form their own state and elect their own government; they enforce their dictatorship over the running dogs of imperialism -- the landlord class and bureaucrat-bourgeoisie, as well as the representatives of those classes, the Kuomintang reactionaries and their accomplices -- suppress them, allow them only to behave themselves and not to be unruly in word or deed. If they speak or act in an unruly way, they will be promptly stopped and punished. Democracy is practiced within the ranks of the people, who enjoy the rights of freedom of speech, assembly, association and so on. The right to vote belongs only to the people, not to the reactionaries. The combination of these two aspects, democracy for the people and dictatorship over the reactionaries, is the people's democratic dictatorship.

And as for whether Bennett actually said the words attributed to him, "I don't think US should be the leader of the world," who knows?