On April 20, 2024, Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng attended the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024 and delivered a speech.

Ambassador Xie said that Chinese modernization is about both material abundance and cultural-ethical enrichment, with the aim of promoting all-round social progress and well-rounded human development. From day one of its founding, the Communist Party of China has been a champion of democracy. We have written “upholding and protecting human rights” into our Constitution, and incorporated “democracy” and “freedom” into both core socialist values and the common values of humanity. 

China’s democracy is whole-process people’s democracy. It is a democracy in both process and outcome; a combination of both procedural and substantive, and direct and indirect democracy. It is people’s democracy in nature, and at the same time represents the will of the state. The Kennedy School’s decade-long surveys in China showed that over 90% of the Chinese people are satisfied with the central government.

Ambassador Xie stressed that all roads lead to Rome, and a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Democracy is not an ornament or a show. It should be about solving real problems for the people. Likewise, each civilization is unique in its own way, and none is superior to others. This is why President Xi Jinping put forward the Global Civilization Initiative. It advocates respect for the diversity of civilizations, and calls for overcoming estrangement between civilizations with exchanges, preventing their clash with mutual learning, and rejecting a false sense of superiority with coexistence, so that all civilizations will flourish together.

During the speech, Ambassador Xie also stated China’s solemn position on issues related to Taiwan, Xizang, Xinjiang and Hong Kong.