Before summit, China bashes US democracy
BEIJING – China’s Communist Party took American democracy to task on Saturday, sharply criticizing a global democracy summit being hosted by President Joe Biden this week and extolling the virtues of its governing system.
Party officials questioned how a polarized country that botched its response to COVID-19 could lecture others, and said that efforts to force others to copy the Western democratic model are “doomed to fail.”
The harsh rhetoric reflects a growing clash of values that has been thrust into the spotlight as China rises as a global power. The question is whether the United States and other leading democracies can peacefully co-exist with a powerful authoritarian state whose actions are at odds with the Western model that emerged victorious at the end of the Cold War.
The pandemic exposed defects in the American system, said Tian Peiyan, the deputy director of the Communist Party’s Policy Research Office. He blamed the high COVID-19 death toll in the U.S. on political disputes and a divided government.
“Such democracy brings not happiness but disaster to voters,” he said at a news conference to release a government report on what the Communist Party calls its form of democracy, which is firmly under party control.
Neither China nor Russia are among about 110 governments that have been invited to Biden’s two-day virtual “Summit for Democracy,” which starts Thursday and will address strengthening democracy, defending against authoritarianism, corruption and human rights. The participation of Taiwan, a self-governing democracy that China says should be under its rule, has further angered Beijing.
U.s.-china relations remain strained despite a virtual summit between Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping last month. The American president has repeatedly framed differences with China in his broader call for the U.S. and its allies to demonstrate that democracies can offer humanity a better path toward progress than autocracies.
Chinese officials frequently accuse the U.S. and others of using democracy as a cover to try to suppress China’s rise, a charge echoed at the news conference by Xu Lin, the vice minister of the party’s publicity department.