PICTURE this scenario, if you can: you are a citizen in a nation with a population that numbers more than a billion people - but you have never enjoyed the right to vote for any of your country's national leaders.

The small, secretive group that makes the decision to appoint a new leader has done so only four times since the death of the revolutionary-turned-global-statesman they still call the "Great Helmsman".

I am talking about the People's Republic of China, of course, the biggest (and one of the last) Communist strongholds on earth.

Chairman Mao Zedong began his climb to power in April 1917 when he was published in the Chinese journal New Youth. This was his first essay. But the article was neither political or ideological in any real sense.

Titled "A Study of Physical Education", Mao's thoughts on the weakness of China - which was at the time dominated by various foreign imperialist powers which had hacked off bits and pieces of this great Asian land mass, mostly in the coastal areas and its important port cities - were that: "If China is weak, it is because the Chinese themselves were weak physically. Their culture puts the emphasis on developing the intellect but neglecting the physical strengthening of the body."

This opinion was obviously formed three decades before the Communist rebels' Long March across the length of China, when Mao gained huge respect for the long-suffering Chinese peasants who would form the backbone for his revolution.

Nevertheless his focus on physical health and fitness would be a life-long obsession on Mao's part, best illustrated by his annual plunge into the great Yang-Tze River as an example for the Chinese people. He would take such swims even when he was a very old man, often in the dead of the winter.

But apart from being the leader who finally united a China that had been fragmented throughout the first half of the 20th century he was also the man who led the Chinese Communist Party, which more than 20 years after his death still controls China. From out of the ranks of the Communist Party every leader has emerged since Mao's death; the Chinese politburo only this month elevated Hu Jintao to the post.

There was no election fever involved; this was more like a cheoreographed stage show than a free-wheeling political contest as we in the West understand them. And the old leadership did not even take their final bow when Hu Jintao (pictured left) was announced.

A new Chinese leader is invariably hand-picked by his predecessor; and sometimes that former leader hangs around. In this case China's former leader Jiang Zemin will still control the army, thus providing him with a continued power base.

Not all Chinese changes in power have been peaceful. Often there has been bloodshed, plots and other intrigues. In 1989 thousands of Chinese students marched to Beijing's great Tiananmen Square to demand the creation of a democratic system in China.

With the huge portrait of Mao Zedong looking down from the Great Hall of the People, the symbol of the pro-democracy demonstration was a white icon modelled on the Statue of Liberty called the Goddess of Democracy and Freedom. It was erected in the centre of Tiananmen Square by the students protestors.

All during the month of May, as the world looked on, the students carried on their demonstration for democracy.

During that time more than a million Chinese citizens defied martial law and successfully blocked soldiers attempting to enter central Beijing, including a memorable scene recorded on videotape of a lone Chinese man blocking a whole line of tanks.

But it was to be a false dawn for democracy. By June 3 a military crackdown began in earnest. Thousands of well-armed troops of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA), backed up by armoured units, brutally crushed the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square and the surrounding areas of Beijing. To the horror and dismay of many, the People's Liberation Army had opened fire on its own people. At least 700 protesters were killed, hundreds were wounded and hundreds more were jailed or forced into exile.

Before the crackdown the then-Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev had been on a state visit to China and had gone to Tiananmen Square where he was enthusiastically greeted by students and other pro-democracy protesters.

He, of course, was an example to the students - the worst possible example in the eyes of China's Communist Party elite. Gorbachev, through his own attempts to introduce a range of new political and intellectual freedoms in the former Soviet Union in liberalisation programmes called perestroika and glasnost, had produced a wholly unintended set of consequences.

GORBACHEV had hoped to reform the Communist system in the former Soviet Union. But, of course, his reforms ultimately led to the dismantlement of that corrupt and failed system. His Chinese counterparts were well aware of those consequences; consequently they sent a brutal and direct message to their people when they put down the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

In order to preserve the Communist monopoly on power, the leadership resisted political reforms but did embark on a plan to liberalise the Chinese economy. The result is now a hybrid system with an economy that is capitalist in all but name but its political system remains both Communist and totalitarian; the so-called socialist system with the Chinese characteristics.

China now boasts the fastest growing economy in Asia; it has a growing and strong military. It will host the Olympics and hopes to challenge the American/Russian monopoly in space by launching its own manned space flights.

China's aim is to become the world's next superpower and it may well be on its way to achieving that goal, at least in economic and military terms.

But it remains a totalitarian country and its political system, if not reformed, may lead to conflict with the world's other superpower, the democratic United States.

So every time I hear Bermudians say that they will not vote, I think of the billion-plus Chinese citizens living in a potential superpower but without the right to vote for their national leaders.

That reality reinforces my understanding that the right to vote must never be taken for granted. Rather it must be respected, cherished and protected. In some parts of the world, people have had to lay down their lives for the right to vote.

Even right here in Bermuda the right to vote has not always been a given and had to be struggled for. One must never take the right to vote for granted.