Commentary  “Never forget,” wrote the exiled Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei in his new memoir, “that under a totalitarian system, cruelty and absurdity go hand in hand.” He is absolutely right. Last week, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) started talking about democracy. Indeed, its State Council published a paper declaring itself a “whole-process democracy.” Excuse me? That is morally cruel—insulting—and intellectually absurd. If it were not for my friends in prison in Hong Kong or languishing in concentration camps in Xinjiang, if it were not for Chinese Christian pastors jailed for their faith, Falun Gong practitioners tortured and stripped of their organs, Tibetan Buddhists defrocked and repressed, or civil society activists and citizen journalists hunted down for revealing the truth about the Chinese regime’s failings and corruption, I would have simply laughed. It’s like a joke. But because of the consequences of the policies of one of the world’s most …