In wake of tawdry US poll campaign, Communist China’s media gloats about ‘inertness of Western democracy’

NEW DELHI: In the wake of the nasty, brutish and short US Presidential poll campaign, Communist China’s state-run media has for weeks now been gloating about the “flaws”, “inertness” and “inefficacy” of the US and other western democracies.

An article today in People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, titled ‘World Doubt the Leadership of Uncle Sam’, cited a Chinese academic’s paper to detail why the US’s democracy is “flawed”. It said the US election is “manipulated by capital” and “that the whole process has fallen into personal attacks between the two candidates” Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump .

“Coupled with some other faults, the US and even the whole world began to question on the effectiveness of US democracy, as well as its leader selected in such a flawed way,” said the article.

Another state-run Chinese news outlet, Global Times, today talked about how the US wasn’t really a representative democracy.

“Most recently, despite the WikiLeaks publication of materials that have discredited Hillary Clinton, the release of video containing Trump's offensive comments about women by CNN has resulted in Clinton pulling ahead in the polls... But that is not because the politically-divided nation found compromise through their democracy... In reality, US voters are not participating in a representative democracy, but rather an ‘elective aristocracy.’... When the influence of citizens in the political decision-making process weakens, this signals a real decline in political representation”, it said.

Both the state-run Chinese publications talked about how domestic US politics, in the US, have an insalubrious effect on international affairs.

“...tensions and party politics, especially among party elites, tend to spill over into international affairs. That was how George W. Bush's plan for the Middle East came to be presented at the National Endowment for Democracy on November 3, 2003,” Global Times said. It was referring to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by a US-led coalition.

People’s Daily, too, quoted Zhang Ruizhuang, Director of the Center of American Studies at Nankai University, as saying that “with a made-up excuse”, the US pulled Iraq into a war. “The US, its Western allies, as well as the whole world, are now swallowing the sour fruits resulted from its self-willed deed,” he added.

In addition, even the 2008 financial crisis “barely stimulated” US society which “tends to be mediocre and conservative about its ideas,” Zhang added. He further blamed “political correctness” for creating “an unfavorable environment for the (US Presidential) candidates to come up with new ideas acceptable to the public.”

“As a result, the world was presented with an election farce performed by the two unqualified and big-mouth candidates selected by the two parties,” the author said.