Year ender 2021: China, a one-party system that calls itself a democracy

New Delhi [India], December 23 : Amid the unchecked pandemic, accelerating changes unseen in a century and a period of transformation, China has described itself as standing on the side of human progress and on the right side of history.
In response to the Summit for Democracy hosted by the Joe Biden administration this month, Beijing issued a white paper titled "China: Democracy That Works." Promoting the white paper and China's model of "whole-process people's democracy", Le Yucheng, China's vice minister of foreign affairs, had said that "China is a well-deserved democracy."
At the annual foreign policy review, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that China has drawn from experience and wisdom from the 100-year journey of the Communist Party of China to forge ahead in keeping with the general trend, overall dynamics and entire course of history.
Although the country's leaders and Communist party have only grown powerful back home, dominating both public and private sectors. However, they have also faced a lot of challenges.
While China's leadership claims its economy is becoming more open, better regulated, and less dominated by the state, the opposite is true. Since General Secretary Xi assumed power in 2012, the Party has deepened its presence in the nonstate sector and begun supplanting the regulatory and administrative functions of China's bureaucracy in the name of improved market integrity, according to U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
The CCP is also evolving and increasing means to monitor, exert influence over, and intervene in corporate affairs. China's government is simultaneously becoming an increasingly active investor in nonstate firms and mobilizing broad segments of the nonstate economy to contribute to its technology ambitions.
There are various legal and political channels through which the CCP and China's administrative state are extending their influence over Chinese firms. The proliferation of these channels is motivated by the CCP's attempt to attain greater visibility into and control over China's corporate sector.
The CCP is also using its internal anti-corruption investigations to gather information on and punish corporate malfeasance, in place of China's weak regulatory apparatus. The outcome of these processes is a complex expansion of government involvement in China's business environment.
2021 was no different. This year has also seen a crackdown on capital, private businesses and the entertainment industry. Chinese regulators have moved aggressively to restrict what they see as overly powerful companies, especially in Big Tech, according to CNN.
CCP has extended its reach ever further into citizens' private lives with new rules on how long children can play video games, when and how students take after-school classes, which entertainers people can watch on TV, and what kind of activities fans can do to support their favourite celebrity.
China's President Xi Jinping has put China's tycoons on notice that it is time for them to share more wealth with the rest of the country. As Xi prepares for a likely third term, he is promising "common prosperity" to lift farmers and working families into the middle class, according to an article published by The New York Times (NYT) in September.
Xi has said the Communist Party will pursue "common prosperity," pressing businesses and entrepreneurs to help narrow the stubborn wealth gap that could hold back the country's rise and erode public confidence in the leadership.
The "common prosperity" campaign has converged with a crackdown on the country's tech giants to curb their dominance.
Earlier in November, Xi Jinping further consolidated his power after the Chinese Communist Party's Sixth Plenum.
A gathering of all 376 full-time and substitute CCP Central Committee members further cemented Xi's political control and his "authoritarian image" within the party and military echelon.
As the world intently scrutinized the CCP's latest plenum outcome, the Sixth Plenum passed an important milestone resolution on "major achievements and historic experiences" since the CCP's founding one hundred years ago in 1921.
The plenum called upon the "entire Party, the military, and all Chinese people to rally more closely around the Central Committee with Xi Jinping at its core."