< Not invited to Biden's democracy summit, China launches a propaganda blitz

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The U.S.-led democracy summit kicked off today online. The login and password were not sent to China because they weren't invited. So it has launched a propaganda blitz of its own in which the country's ruling Communist Party claims that it, too, is a democracy, just of a different sort. NPR's two China reporters, John Ruwitch and Emily Feng, report.

EMILY FENG, BYLINE: China kicked off its own democracy week with a 30-page government report published over the weekend called "China: Democracy That Works."

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FANG NING: (Speaking Chinese).

FENG: This is Fang Ning, a former director of the state-run Social Sciences Academy (ph), which wrote the report. He says communist states such as North Korea or East Germany during the Cold War all have the word democratic in their official titles. And from the beginning, the Chinese Communist Party has also championed democracy, the argument being the U.S. should not get to decide what counts as democracy.

China also argues that it delivers for its people and has dramatically raised standards of living. And finally, although China does not have direct elections or multi-party rule, it says it kind of asks the people what they want through what the Communist Party has long called the people's democratic dictatorship, where the party is delegated to represent the people. Here's Fang again.

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FANG: (Speaking Chinese).

FENG: He says elections would plunge China into turmoil. So China instead holds consultations with the people - for example, sending research teams out to talk to communities and make recommendations that inform the government. Besides defending their own system, a state-linked think tank listed 10 failures of American democracy. Wang Wen, the think tank's director, explained.

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WANG WEN: (Speaking Chinese).

FENG: He asked a crowd of diplomats and journalists gathered in a luxury Beijing hotel whether American democracy actually defends freedom. He argued that thousands of people have died of COVID in the U.S., and excessive freedom has led to disinformation and culture wars. To be clear, China is a one-party, authoritarian state. And that party, the Communist Party, brooks no opposition, which begs the question, who is China trying to convince?

JOHN RUWITCH, BYLINE: I put that question to Peter Martin, a Bloomberg reporter and author of a book about China's diplomatic messaging.

PETER MARTIN: On some level, it's as simple as Xi Jinping likes the tough tone. And he signaled to the bureaucracy that he wants China to stand up for itself and never to tolerate bullying.

RUWITCH: A message that plays well at home.

MARTIN: To domestic audiences in China's political system, they get to look like they're striking back and acting tough.

RUWITCH: Martin says it fits into Beijing's broader efforts to stop the West from hogging the mic when it comes to global discourse about China. And it does something else, too.

MARTIN: And that's this classic tactic which denialists of all stripes and on all issues come back to, which is just muddying the waters and painting false equivalents.

RUWITCH: Which he says may help other authoritarian states feel more comfortable cloaking themselves in the language of democracy. For the summit, the Biden administration invited around 110 governments. One that's conspicuously missing from the list is Singapore, a longstanding U.S. ally and a parliamentary democracy.

BILAHARI KAUSIKAN: Well, thank God. Thank God. Thank God.

RUWITCH: Bilahari Kausikan is a former diplomat who represented Singapore at the United Nations. The Southeast Asian city-state has always walked a fine line between Washington and Beijing, and he says attending Biden's summit would have been a bad idea.

KAUSIKAN: In the context in which Mr. Biden is holding this, the context of geopolitical rivalry with China, it will constrain us. It puts us into a pigeon hole, whereas we want to have the maximum strategic autonomy.

RUWITCH: That doesn't mean he buys Beijing's assertion that it's some kind of paragon of democracy, though.

KAUSIKAN: I mean, look. We are not stupid, right? We understand why you're doing this. We understand why China is doing this.

RUWITCH: It's just another front in a rivalry that's getting worse and making life for countries that prefer not to take sides more difficult. I'm John Ruwitch in California.

FENG: And Emily Feng, NPR News, Beijing.

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