China smart not to overreact to Biden's Summit for Democracy
Beijing's criticisms of America's own dysfunctional system are sure to resonate
Minxin Pei is professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a nonresident senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
U.S. President Joe Biden's virtual Summit for Democracy, which begins today and concludes on Friday, is a critical component of his strategy of contesting China's global influence.
With the Biden administration framing the U.S.-China competition as a struggle between two ideological models -- democracy versus dictatorship -- convening a summit of 110 countries that the U.S. considers democracies is a vital step toward rallying like-minded partners to America's cause of containing Beijing's power around the world.
It remains to be seen whether the two-day event will achieve Washington's objective. In all likelihood, it will produce little more than rhetoric, not substantive outcomes. The enormous ideological diversity and geopolitical interests of the invitees will make it hard for the U.S. to get them to agree on a future agenda that will strengthen American leverage over China.
But China is still upset with the U.S. attempt to use this ideological divide to isolate China. From Beijing's perspective, the Summit for Democracy is just another Washington smokescreen to conceal its geopolitical objective of defending its hegemony against China's challenge.
Chinese leaders understand that framing the Sino-American strategic conflict in ideological terms puts them at a significant disadvantage because nearly all the developed economies are democracies, and the U.S. is more likely to rally these countries to its cause by invoking shared values of freedom and human rights.
In addition, the inclusion of Taiwan in the summit is obviously a diplomatic setback for Beijing. Even though Taiwan will be represented by its digital minister and de facto ambassador to the U.S., this is the first time Taipei will be an official participant in a major international event sponsored by the U.S. Despite its fury, China's reaction has been relatively restrained mainly because overreaction to a largely symbolic summit could be counterproductive.
The first prong of China's counteroffensive has been a vigorous defense of China's "democracy."
The Information Office of the State Council, the Chinese cabinet, issued a white paper titled "China: Democracy That Works" on Dec. 4 to defend the country's political regime. The paper insists that democracy should be defined in terms of country-specific cultural values and, in an apparent dig at the poor performance of democracies in recent years, stresses that democracy is not a decorative object but an instrument to solve people's problems.
The second prong is a frontal attack on the status of democracy in America. On Dec. 5, the Chinese Foreign Ministry released its first-ever report with the title "The State of Democracy in the United States," listing well-known dysfunctions of America's political system, such as money politics, gridlock and racism. The report also singled out America's promotion of democracy for particular scorn, blaming it for causing instability and even humanitarian disasters in other countries.
The third prong of China's counterattack is a reframing of Sino-American rivalry so that the international community's attention is drawn away from the differences between the styles of government in Beijing and Washington, with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi charging that the purpose of Washington's Summit for Democracy is not to promote democracy but to preserve its "hegemony" and to "defend its domination in the world in the name of democracy."
China's counteroffensive will most likely have mixed results. Few countries will be persuaded that China actually practices democracy in any meaningful way. While its government may have performed well in delivering economic growth and responding to the COVID pandemic despite initial missteps, the Chinese people exercise few democratic rights and have no say in picking their leaders.
Beijing's criticisms of America's dysfunctional democracy are sure to resonate abroad. The U.S. political malaise cataloged in the report of the Chinese Foreign Ministry is real and worrisome. Still, while one can question the wisdom of the Biden administration hosting an international summit of democracy to confront autocratic regimes abroad at a time when America's own democracy is under siege, China will not gain much by pointing out America's obvious failings, which do not make China's one-party state seem more attractive.
The charge that the U.S. is merely using the Summit for Democracy to preserve its hegemony may be stating the obvious, but that is not likely to sway many minds.
For genuine liberal democracies participating in the summit, China presents both a geopolitical and an ideological threat. But for at least a third of the invitees that are classified by Freedom House as Not Free or Partly Free, China is probably seen not as an ideological threat but a geopolitical opportunity.
After firing its rhetorical salvos, Beijing will likely focus more on geopolitical maneuvers to offset any unwelcome fallout from the summit, such as unveiling more diplomatic and economic support for geopolitically important countries snubbed by the Biden administration such as Hungary, Egypt and Turkey, and befriend borderline democracies less interested in joining an America-led ideological crusade against dictatorship than capitalizing on the U.S.-China rivalry for substantive benefits.
Given China's weak hand, this pragmatic approach may be its best response to Washington's new ideological offensive.