[ The Chinese criticisms, while pointed, mirrored broad concerns
among both U.S. allies and rivals as the United States wrestled with unfounded
allegations of electoral fraud from President Trump on
Wednesday, an emerging legal showdown and the prospect of internal divisions
that could endure well beyond Inauguration Day. Sizing up the situation, newspapers
in South Korea and Japan this week questioned the “intrinsic value of
democracy” while Britain’s former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt warned about a
potential “catastrophe for the worldwide reputation of democracy.”]
By Gerry Shih
“U.S.
democracy now a joke,” the Beijing-backed Ta Kung Pao broadsheet pronounced.
Follow
the latest on Election 2020
“A
bit like a developing country,” the Global Times sniffed as it contemplated the
possibility of post-election violence erupting in the world’s most powerful
democracy.
As
the United States tallied votes in a presidential election
that appears headed for a court battle and fractious final phase, Chinese
commentators and state mouthpieces this week lined up to portray the
cross-Pacific superpower — viewed with awe and envy by generations of Chinese —
as a politically crumbling edifice in 2020.
The
Chinese criticisms, while pointed, mirrored broad concerns among both U.S. allies
and rivals as the United States wrestled with unfounded allegations of electoral fraud from
President Trump on Wednesday, an emerging legal showdown and the prospect of
internal divisions that could endure well beyond Inauguration Day. Sizing up
the situation, newspapers in South Korea and Japan this week questioned the
“intrinsic value of democracy” while Britain’s former foreign secretary Jeremy
Hunt warned about a potential “catastrophe for the worldwide reputation of
democracy.”
But
in China, state media and the commentariat followed the unprecedented scenes
from the United States not with anxiety but schadenfreude. The country had been
locked in an increasingly ideological confrontation with the Trump
administration and has doubled down in recent years on promoting the legitimacy
of Communist Party rule to its citizens.
In
a piece in Xinhua’s China Comment magazine, Wang Pengquan, a state socialism
researcher, chastised his compatriots for reflexively “kowtowing” to U.S.
superiority and urged them to build a “modern socialist country.”
“America-worshippers
exaggerate its political system’s ability to self-correct and tout its
so-called freedom,” Wang wrote. “Facts speak louder than words. The vast
majority of Chinese can see through the reality of U.S. political division,
economic stagnation and social turmoil.”
No
matter the outcome of the election, there is little hope for the United States
to regain the global leadership it inherited at the end of World War II, wrote
Xinhua editor Wang Jinwei in another piece as he described a country racked
by racial tensions, economic inequality and unchecked coronavirus cases.
Criticisms
of liberal democracy, to be sure, are nothing new from Beijing, where the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) holds power with an iron grip. China has rapped
neighboring Taiwan and South Korea, for instance, when brawls have broken out
in their parliaments. When the presidential election in 2000 between George W.
Bush and Al Gore descended into controversy before being settled by the Supreme
Court, state media noted mildly that the U.S. electoral system “is in fact not
perfect.”
The
tone was harsher this time.
“Democracy
has not made America great again, nor has it saved Americans from the
pandemic,” said Wang Wen, an executive dean at Renmin University in Beijing who
wrote an essay earlier this year titled “the End of the American Century.”
“This
is no longer the United States we knew in the past,” Wang told The Washington
Post.
{Taiwan
frets over how a Biden administration would deal with China]
Freedom
House, a nongovernmental, nonpartisan advocacy organization in Washington,
D.C., released a report this year that included the United States among
countries where democratic institutions have weakened.
But
Sarah Cook, a China researcher at Freedom House, said the Chinese criticisms of
democracies were “ironic” and a “typical part of the playbook” from its state
media. Cartoons and memes mocking Trump and U.S. politicians have been
widespread in China, but “any user posting anything even remotely irreverent of
Xi Jinping faces severe punishment, including possible imprisonment,” she said,
referring to the Chinese president.
“Those
kinds of actions speak louder than words in terms of the deep level of
insecurity behind the CCP and state media’s boasting of their own system.”
As
vote totals climbed, many independent outlets on Chinese social media, which
represent the most popular way for many Chinese to consume news, scrambled to
provide readers detailed explanations on matters such as the U.S. electoral college,
why absentee ballots could dramatically shift vote totals after polls closed,
and the implications of Trump declaring an early victory.
Government
censors, for the most part, stayed at arm’s length from discussions about U.S.
politics as the topic racked up nearly 7 billion views on Weibo.
In
Hong Kong, where Beijing has accused Washington of political interference, the
Communist Party-controlled Ta Kung Pao newspaper seized on the election turmoil as an example of
Washington’s “double standards.”
The
U.S. government sided last year with Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters who
demanded the right to choose the city’s leader rather than selecting from
candidates prescreened by Beijing. Yet the U.S. president is also not selected
simply by popular vote, the newspaper argued, while pointing out that the U.S.
election could be mired in a legal challenge and that the White House is
barricaded behind steel bars.
“What
is infuriating is that Americans themselves reject so-called true universal
suffrage but ask Hong Kong to promote it,” Ta Kung Pao opined. “The U.S.
election is not a model of democracy, but an ugly demonstration of democracy.
It’s a worldwide laughingstock.”
When
the U.S. Embassy in Beijing also sought to explain the electoral college on
Weibo as part of the State Department’s public diplomacy, it was also greeted
with skepticism.
One
Chinese user derided the state of democracy in the United States as “slipping
to the level of Belarus or Venezuela.”
Another
joked that America is so divided it should adopt China’s “one country, two systems” framework for
governing Hong Kong: “You can have two governments and two presidents!”
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