China is once again speaking out against the American political process and criticizing the 2016 presidential election.
“The American election has plummeted to new depths,” the state-sponsored Xinhua News Agency said Monday. “The lack of a bottom line in competition between the parties has already become a lack of a moral bottom line.”
Despite Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang’s statement that China “does not comment” on U.S. presidential elections, China regularly criticizes U.S. presidential elections to legitimize its one-party political system. The scandals and intense competition between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are focal points in the Chinese media.
“The second debate between White House contenders Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, considered as one of the nastiest U.S. presidential debates in recent memory, reflects the decay of U.S. politics and a deeply divided society,” Xinhua wrote Tuesday.
“The race to the bottom will … make [people] rethink the value of democracy,” the Global Times wrote over the weekend. The “extreme self-confidence and arrogance by the ‘preacher of democracy’ should be reined in,” argued the People’s Daily.
“The chaotic 2016 presidential election has highlighted the defects in the U.S. election system and the dysfunction of democracy,” Zhang Zhixin, head of American Political Studies at the Institute of American Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a state-owned Chinese think tank, wrote in a China Daily op-ed Tuesday.
Zhang asserts that Clinton’s email scandal “revealed the black box of how party elites manipulate the presidential election.” Speaking of Trump, he argues that regardless of whether Trump wins or loses, “he has irreversibly damaged US democracy already.”
Chinese media asserts that the election has evolved into a series of personal attacks rather than discussions on the issues. The Global Times argues that it is the nature of the U.S. political system that makes candidates fierce.
The view from China of the 2016 election appears particularly bleak. Zhang’s article referred to it as a sign of the “failure of democracy.”
“It is time for the U.S. politics to have self-reflection,” Xinhua concluded. “The 2016 presidential election has made one thing clear, the U.S. needs political reform,” Zhang noted. Their comments mirror American comments advocating political reform in China.
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