“‘Democracy’ has long since become a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ that the US is using to interfere in other countries,” said a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Saturday. The USA organized the democracy summit in order to “draw lines of ideological prejudice, to instrumentalize democracy and to use it as a weapon and to cause division and confrontation”. Beijing will “firmly oppose any kind of pseudo-democracies,” said the spokesman.
China – like Russia – had already sharply criticized the summit organized by US President Joe Biden in advance and described US democracy as “corrupt” and “failed”. Instead, Beijing promoted its own version of “holistic popular democracy”.
The democracy summit was an election campaign promise by the US president who placed the struggle between democracies and “autocratic governments” at the center of his foreign policy. China and Russia were not invited, and NATO member Turkey and EU member Hungary were not on the invitation list either. Taiwan, on the other hand, was there, to the annoyance of China. The summit took place online on Thursday and Friday. In its second edition next year, it is to be held physically.
China had previously accused the US of promoting ideological rifts like in the Cold War. Washington has repeatedly stressed that there will be no Cold War with China. However, tensions between the two countries have increased significantly in recent years due to disagreements in the areas of trade, technological competition and human rights, among other things.
Source: Nachrichten
