BEIJING will publish a report entitled China: Democracy That Works on Satuday as it slammed a forthcoming US “summit for democracy” as “the very opposite of democracy.”

Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng said the US summit, a two-day virtual meeting aimed at shoring up international backing for Washington’s new cold war, will “do no good to global solidarity, no good to co-operation and no good to development.”

The democracy report forms part of a sharpening ideological confrontation between Beijing and Washington as the former rejects the US’s right to define democratic standards.

“China’s whole-process democracy is not the kind that wakes up at the time of voting and goes dormant afterwards,” Mr Le said.

And Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian went further today, decrying US democracy as “a river with no source, a tree without roots” as he pointed to a recent Harvard University survey of young US citizens which found just 7 per cent thought their country was “a healthy democracy.”

More than half of young adults surveyed thought US democracy was “in trouble” or “failing” and over a third expected a second civil war to erupt in their lifetimes, he noted.

US democracy was “a trick to fool citizens at home and a tool to implement its hegemony abroad,” Mr Zhao continued, citing a 53-country survey by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation conducted in May that found 44 per cent of respondents viewed Washington as a threat to democracy in their country.

China’s promotion of the “whole-process democracy” concept began in 2019, and the government says it combines elections with extensive consultation and involvement of local communities in decision-making to “continuously participate in the day-to-day political activities at all levels.”

Beijing says its worker-representative model — with the supreme legislative body, the National People’s Congress, consisting of deputies who meet once annually in full session but continue otherwise with their ordinary jobs — is less prone to corruption than the career-politician legislatures of the West. 

“If the people are awakened only for voting, if they are given a song and dance during campaigning but have no say after the election, or if they are favoured during canvassing but are left out in the cold after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy,” President Xi Jinping has declared.