Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has termed China's one-party rule a unique model of governance that is an alternative to Western electoral democracies.
Khan made the remarks in Islamabad as part of the Chinese Communist Party's centenary event on Thursday. "Until now, we had been told that the best way for societies to improve was through Western democracy. However, CPC introduced an alternative system and they have beaten all Western electoral democracies in the way they have highlighted merit in society," Pakistan PM said, as quoted by The News International.
Khan said a society only succeeds when it has systems in place for holding the ruling elite accountable and ensuring meritocracy. "Until now, the feeling was that electoral democracy is the best way to bring leaders on merit and hold them accountable. But the CPC has achieved much better without democracy. Their system for sifting through talent and bringing it up is better than the democratic system."
Aside from praising Beijing's governance system, Khan also repeated Pakistan's support for the Chinese government regarding its policies in the Muslim-majority Xinjiang province.
"Our interaction with Chinese officials, that version of what is happening in Xinjiang is completely different to the version of what we hear from the Western media and the Western governments," he said on Thursday.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of China's genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Pakistan has said it believes in Beijing's version regarding the treatment of minorities in the region.
Pakistan Prime Minister, who projects himself as the champion of Islam or a crusader against Islamophobia, has turned a blind eye to the Chinese atrocities against Muslim minorities because of Islamabad's "extreme proximity and relationship with Beijing".
China has been globally rebuked for cracking down on Uyghur Muslims by sending them to mass detention camps to undergo some form of forcible "re-education or indoctrination".
In recent months, the Canadian, Dutch, British, Lithuanian, and Czech parliaments adopted motions recognising the Uyghur crisis as genocide.
( With inputs from ANI )
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