Four days ahead of the United States (US) President Joe Biden’s Summit For Democracy that is scheduled to be held from December 9-10, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Sunday released a report titled “The State of Democracy in the United States.”
Chinese state-owned media house Global Times hailed the report for “exposing the deficiencies and abuse of democracy in the US as well as the harm of it exporting such democracy.” Experts cited by the media house described the report as “timely and to the point.”
Consisting of a preamble and conclusion, the report also has two parts, titled “What is democracy?” and “The alienation and three malaises of democracy in the US.” The report expressed hope that “the US will improve its own system and practices of democracy and change its way of interacting with other countries,” noting that this “is in the interest of not only the American people, but also the people of other countries.”
The report went on to say that it “would be totally undemocratic to measure the diverse political systems in the world with a single yardstick or examine different political civilizations from a single perspective...The political system of a country should be independently decided by its own people.” “Over the years, democracy in the United States has become alienated and degenerated, and it has increasingly deviated from the essence of democracy and its original design, said the report,” it said.
At the same time, Beijing released another white paper on Saturday titled “China: Democracy That Works.” The paper outlines its own “democratic” model with details and examples demonstrating how its democracy functions under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, its “sound institutional framework, the concrete and pragmatic practices of China’s democracy, and the new model of democracy that China has developed.”
Biden announced the democracy summit in February this year, delivering on a campaign promise to conduct a meeting with democratic allies and partners regarding the situation of democracy around the world. The leaders are expected to discuss key themes such as protection against authoritarianism, combating corruption, and promoting respect for human rights.
The invitation list of the event, which includes 110 participating countries, has created a lot of stir. The list excludes traditional US rivals such as Russia and China, but includes the Chinese-claimed island of Taiwan, and problematic democracies such as Brazil, Poland, India, and the Philippines. Other questionable invitees at the Summit include Israel and Iraq, the only representatives from the Middle East, and Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, and Niger.
Sharing China’s displeasure about being excluded from the multilateral event, Russia accused Washington of “trying to privatise the term ‘democracy,” and called the Summit “divisive.”
The announcement of the summit interestingly follows the release of Stockholm-based think tank International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance’s annual report, which listed the US as a “backsliding democracy” for the first time.