On November 29 and 30th of 2008, Mr. Wei Jingsheng was invited to attend the Festival of Modernity: Democracy, organized by the publisher Spirali in Milan, Italy. The festival was also attended by other well-known Chinese, including Lu Decheng and author Zhou Qing. Other attendees include the former Russian Minister of Energy, dissident writers and well-known painters, as well as authors and philosophers from various European countries.
In Wei Jingsheng's speech, he pointed out that, although the current hottest topic is the financial crisis, very few people noticed that the Western democratic system is running into trouble itself. The main reason that makes this a widespread and in-depth crisis is due to the adjustment of the global manufacturing sector in the last 20 to 30 years. The difference between these current adjustments in comparison to any previous adjustment of the manufacturing sector is that this adjustment was not produced by large-scale technical progress. Instead, without any major technical progress, this adjustment was produced by the availability of large amounts of cheap labor that attracted the investment and thus caused the transfer of capital. The characteristic of this type of capital transfer is that, on one side, multi-national companies win high profit; while on the other side, there is large-scale unemployment in the developed countries. Or to put it in a different way, while the capital was transferred to the undeveloped countries and areas, the global economy was going backwards instead of forward. The displayed feature is the huge trade deficit; the developed countries were eating their own future away, living hand to mouth.
Wei said: "this time I was in Germany participating a dispute, which exposed the infiltration of the Chinese Communist Party to the democratic countries. By infiltrating the Western news media and political circle, the Chinese Communists tried to paint a pretty picture of its system that made high profit through cruel exploitation. While the Chinese bureaucratic capitalists and Western big business share this huge profit, the Chinese workers are living miserably and the Western workers lost their jobs.
Wei further pointed out that: "Why didn't the governments of these developed countries notice this problem, and instead used the unfair trade policies to push the situation further? Why for a long time, would they accept a trade policy that is not beneficial to their own countries? We all know that the lobbying of big business had the determining effect on this, an effect that almost nothing can resist. The democratic system ran into a boulder in the river. This current financial crisis did not accumulate in a short time; nor was it due to purely economic reasons. The deeper layers of reasons include that the democratic system has been off of its original tracks; that money manipulated or influenced politics. Now, this democracy has been discounted. As we resolve the economic crisis, we should make a time table to reform the political system in the Western countries themselves."
