First Taste of Democracy
I had my first taste
of democracy yesterday, Oct. 14th 2008. It was the general election day for
Canada. Since I turn 18 and becoming an eligible voter, there has been two
elections. Regretfully, I did not vote in the first one, not that it would make
any difference since it was strong Liberal riding.
It was very
interesting and exciting for me to cast the ballot. Growing up in China,
educated in Canada (at Queen's, a very grassroots democratic school, almost
everything at the university is run by student. We even got an elected rector
who gets a say in the school budget setting.) I found this constant struggle and
debate about political system. What is the better form of government? A
mono-party system in China or multi-party democratic system like in the West? (I
hate to use the word dictatorship, because the current government is not run by
one person, hardly even a circle of people. There are some constant political
struggle between different fraction of the party behind the scene. That could be
a topic for another post.) On one end, I found
pro-Chinese government people arguing that democracy is bad because it
never gets things and it is just corrupted. The main evidence they have for this
is India and Taiwan, and sometimes Japan. Now we can probably add US to the list
for its failure to prevent the financial Armageddon. It is true that democracy
is inefficient. Any political textbook will tell you that. In
a representative system, politician tend to trade favors to support each
other's bill. US is really bad at this, pork and barrel projects tow to about
$200 billion. However it is untrue that democracy induce corruption. In a well
designed democracy anyways. Taiwan's democracy is still at infant stage, but
even then we can observe the beauty of democracy. That is of course correction.
In Taiwan case, we can see the prosecution of a former president, which we will
not able to observe in a non-democratic society. Look broadly, we can see that
democratic countries, especially US, have made many mistake at the top, but it
is very impressive that the system can heal itself by elect the right person who
is going to fix the problem. I deeply believe that is real beauty and impressive
thing about democracy. It can be wrong sometimes, but it also can heal itself,
whereas in an authoritarian state, the system heal itself through
revolution and civil wars. Much more painful way to correct the
wrong.
Until a better
system discovered, we should stick with Churchill's words: "Many forms
of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe.
No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said
that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that
have been tried from time to time."
