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American democracy has universal significance and deserves serious study, while Chinese journalists showed the highest percentage of opposition against American democracy as a universal political model. However, if similar surveys were conducted during the 2016 election, it is safe to assume that the favorability ratings would have dropped among almost all segments of the Chinese people.

       CHINA VIEWS THE DECAY OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

      A longstanding view between the Chinese is that because of the United States’ superpower status it possesses both the capability and the willingness to use ideology as a weapon against other nations. Not surprisingly, the Chinese government routinely criticizes the United States as a nation that exploits the ideas of democracy and human rights in order to delegitimize and destabilize foreign countries that adopt alternative values and systems. While the Chinese government has excoriated the ills of American democracy during past elections, the 2016 election has afforded America’s critics in China unprecedented opportunities to expound on the perils of America’s political system as well as make perhaps the strongest case so far against Americanstyle democracy as an alternative model for China. As China’s condemnation of American democracy was echoed by one of the major presidential candidates, who himself called the US system “rigged,” it was not surprising that the Chinese state media launched a yearlong campaign to mock and discredit American democracy.

The People’s Daily, China’s party mouthpiece, led this campaign against the United States with a series of feature articles and commentaries (both in Chinese and English) lamenting the decay of American democracy. One of its editorials opened with the following words, “Americans are sick and tired of the election drama because they are disappointed and frustrated, and they have lost confidence in the system because American democracy no longer functions.”⁵⁷ After the third presidential debate, The People’s Daily launched continued coverage of the election from November 25 to 28 and published a total of six feature articles and commentaries with titles such as “What’s Wrong with American-Style Democracy?,” “Money Politics Can’t Cure the Ills of Rich-poor Inequality,” “Defects in U.S. System Make Way for Political Extremism,” and “Washington Politics Has Become a Ridiculous Joke.”⁵⁸

On Election Day, The People’s Daily wrapped up its coverage of the election by concluding, “the United States is suffering from a great illness.”⁵⁹

Other state media outlets also launched their own share of criticism and condemnation of the election as well as American democracy. The staterun Xinhua News Agency claimed in one of its editorials that the American election had plumbed new depths: “the voters never see the lowest point, because things just keep getting even lower.”⁶⁰ In another editorial, Xinhua lamented that Trump’s ascension to the highest office in the world was solid proof that the majority of Americans had rebelled against the Washington elites and Trump’s election sent a clear signal that the US political system was faltering.⁶¹

      Similar articles were frequently featured in the Global Times, the allegedly nationalist sister paper of The People’s Daily’s. One of its editorials stated:

The rise of Trump has opened a Pandora’s box in US society. Big-mouthed, anti-traditional, abusively forthright, he is a perfect populist that could easily provoke the public. The rise of a racist in the US political arena worries the whole world…. Trump’s win has dealt a heavy blow to the heart of US politics. If such a person can be president, there is something wrong with the existing political order.⁶²

      Rather inappropriately, the same editorial also compared Trump to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, both fascist leaders elected by democratic governments. As each of the candidates’ scandals and election controversies came to light, The Global Times was almost incessant in its efforts to persuade its readers that both Trump and Clinton were exactly the type of corrupted and undesirable leaders that American democracy produces.

As critiques became fashionable in the Chinese media, China’s experts on the US delivered their own verdicts on the state of American democracy. Yuan Peng, Vice President of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, argued that the 2016 US presidential election would go down in history as the “most dark, chaotic and negative [election] in the past two centuries,” and no matter who wins, “it will not be viewed as a victory of democracy.”⁶³ For Yuan, the 2016 election was a “bad” election. The campaign process had lost its meaning and been “reduced to nothing more than a farce.” The chaos and disorder of the election, as far as Yuan is concerned, laid bare America’s economic, social, and political ills. Shen Dingli, a Shanghai-based scholar of international politics, questioned the validity of US democracy as the “gold standard” of democratic institutions and argued that the election of a new president was meaningless because it only testified to the public’s stronger aversion toward the other candidate.⁶⁴ In an article titled “Election game mirrors failure of US democracy,” Zhang Zhixin, a specialist in American politics at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, described the chaotic election as highlighting the dysfunction of American democracy. For him, “the 2016 presidential election has made one thing clear, the US needs political reform.”⁶⁵

While the Chinese media and experts called the election and American democracy a joke, it is important to note that not everyone in China shares the same viewpoint. In particular, for those Chinese with more knowledge of the American political system and more exposure to the world, the 2016 US election, despite all its ugliness and divisiveness, has not eroded their enthusiasm for US-style democracy but rather highlighted the advantages of the American political system vis-à-vis some of the limitations of Chinese politics. For example, in a widely circulated Internet article titled “You Have No Right to Laugh at the U.S. Election,” the anonymous author eloquently defended American democracy.⁶⁶ For all the ugliness of the US election and the candidates, the author argued, the American political system still enjoys certain advantages over the Chinese system, primarily in terms of the freedom of its press, the transparency of its politics, and the nature and degree of popular participation in the decisionmaking process. At the end of the article, the author asked, “Is a system where all decisions are made behind closed doors, where the people are deprived the right to know or the right to say no, really better at making decisions?”⁶⁷

       THE ELECTION’S IMPLICATIONS FOR CHINA

      The 2016 presidential election certainly damaged the United States’ image in China. While American democracy might not have entirely lost its appeal and legitimacy as an exemplary political system, there are at least four important implications for China given that the election has markedly changed Chinese perceptions of the United States.

      First, the unusual negativity and ugliness of the election, as manifested by the nasty campaigns of Trump and Clinton, will not only force Americans to reflect on their own political system, but also compel the Chinese to rethink their understanding of democracy (and American democracy) as it relates to China’s own political reforms. In particular, the chaos and disorder of the election has undermined the attractiveness of representative democracy for a nation that traditionally values stability above all else.

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