China's communists bash US democracy before Biden summit

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.

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.