China’s communists bash US democracy before Biden summit

By KEN MORITSUGU
Associated Press

BEIJING (AP) — China’s Communist Party has taken American democracy to task, 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 divided 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.” Biden, who has made a competition between democracies and autocracies a central theme of his presidency, has invited about 110 governments to a two-day virtual “Summit for Democracy” starting Thursday. Neither China nor Russia have been invited. The participation of Taiwan, a self-governing democracy that China says should be under its rule, has further angered Beijing.