Using coded language and sarcasm, netizens expressed their thoughts on democratic processes and the lack of them.

By Wenhao Ma | Voice of America (VOA)

Summary

Videos of citizens protesting the results of Sunday’s election in Venezuela have spread widely in China. Some netizens have used the opportunity to subtly criticize China’s authoritarian system of government through innocuous statements about the unexpected nature of elections or the rarity of countries without general elections, highlighting the absence of such democratic processes in China.

One user on Weibo (similar to X) posted:

“Why do they still have elections? They definitely haven’t implemented the whole-process democracy” — a concept first proposed by Chinese leader Xi Jinping in 2019.

In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has justified its rule by claiming that China’s “full-process democracy” is a more comprehensive democratic system than Western democracy.

Meanwhile, the United States and China’s state media responded to the election results in marked contrast to one another.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed “grave concerns” about the results and called for transparency in the vote count.

Xi congratulated the disputed winner of Sunday’s election, incumbent president Nicolás Maduro, saying, “China will, as always, firmly support Venezuela’s efforts to safeguard national sovereignty, national dignity and social stability, and firmly support Venezuela’s just cause of opposing external interference.”

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