China’s Communist Party took American democracy to task on Saturday, sharply criticizing a global democracy summit being hosted by President Joe Biden next 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.”
Tian Peiyan, the deputy director of the party’s Policy Research Office, said the pandemic exposed defects in the American system. He blamed the high COVID-19 death toll in the U.S. on political disputes and a divided government from the highest to the lowest levels.
“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. The participation of Taiwan, a self-governing democracy that China says should be under its rule, has further angered Beijing.
