China is seizing on the Biden administration’s “Summit for Democracy” as an opening to ramp up its anti-American propaganda and push its alternative vision for a new world order, dismissing the D.C. gathering this week as a “farce” that “enhances U.S. efforts to “interfere in other countries’ internal affairs.”
The second edition of one of Mr. Biden’s signature foreign policy initiatives is also putting global bloc divisions on vivid display, with the new charges by China’s Foreign Ministry demonstrating Beijing’s rising frustration and concern over a gathering that administration officials say is about supporting democracies amid rising authoritarianism around the world.
Those concerns were unlikely to be eased when Mr. Biden told the 120 invited world leaders Wednesday morning taking part in person and virtually that his administration was setting aside $690 million in new funding aimed at bolstering democracy programs around the globe. The new funding will be used to support free and independent media, combat corruption, bolster human rights, advance technology that improves democracy and support better election processes around the world, U.S. officials said.
While a pre-summit virtual event Tuesday featured an appearance by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and focused on confronting what Secretary of State Antony Blinken described as “Russia’s brutal and unjustified war against Ukraine,” China’s state-controlled media have eagerly pushed an alternative narrative.
“The gathering will show how Washington manipulates democracy to stoke confrontation, divide the world and advance its hegemonic agenda,” stated a commentary disseminated to media outlets in dozens of countries by the Chinese government’s official Xinhua News Agency.
China Daily, a newspaper run by the Central Propaganda Department of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, posted an “editor’s note” online that said the “so-called Summit for Democracy convened by U.S. President Joe Biden reflects his dangerous Cold War mentality.”
“The move by the United States to divide the world into ‘democratic’ and ‘undemocratic’ camps by using its own standard reveals its attempts to preserve its global hegemony,” the note stated.
U.S. officials say the messaging reflects an increasingly aggressive Chinese state-controlled media campaign to promote anti-American narratives — and to echo Russian propaganda about the Ukraine war — in the global competition for hearts. minds and allies.
Analysts say the campaign has become a defining characteristic of “Cold War 2.0” during recent months, with Beijing and Moscow moving into full rhetorical alignment against the U.S. and the network of democracies around the world that side with Washington.
As if on cue, the Kremlin echoed the Chinese criticisms of the summit, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov telling reporters in Moscow Wednesday the summit was an “exercise in moralizing” and not a “serious event.”
“Those who agreed to attend this class were free to do so, of course,” Mr. Peskov said, according to the official Tass news service. “It’s their sovereign right, but here, in fact, many see that such attempts to divide the world into first-rate and second-rate countries are now seen by many with a smile.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the U.S. had not earned the right to stage the summit and criticized the decision of U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres to take part.
“We believe it is the height of hypocrisy on the part of the American authorities to claim leadership in promoting democratic values on a global scale in conditions when their reputation in this area cannot even be called dubious, it has been completely destroyed,” she said.
Competition and confrontation
Despite the Chinese government propaganda push, President Biden and his advisors continue to soft-pedal the official rhetoric toward China, arguing publicly that the U.S. seeks only competition, not confrontation with Beijing, and that America does “not seek a Cold War.”
But the administration has forged ahead this week with its second Summit for Democracy, with Mr. Biden using the announcement of the new $690 million fund to dramatize his commitment. U.S. officials said a key goal of the discussions this year is to zero in on ways to make “technology work for and not against democracy.”
Mr. Biden frequently speaks of the U.S. and like-minded allies being at a crossroads, at a moment when democracies need to demonstrate they can out-deliver autocratic governments such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The summits, something Mr. Biden promised as a Democratic 2020 presidential candidate, have become a keystone of his administration’s effort to try to build deeper alliances and nudge autocratic-leaning nations toward at least modest reforms.
“Strengthening transparent, accountable governance rooted in the consent of the governed is a fundamental imperative of our time,” Mr. Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said in a joint statement at the opening of this year’s summit on Wednesday.
The gathering’s opening has not gone without controversy, with high ideals often clashing with realpolitik concerns.
There was, for instance, concern over potential blowback from a speech to the summit Wednesday morning by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who spoke to the gathering despite Mr. Biden’s declaration a day earlier that he won’t be inviting Mr. Netanuyahu to the White House “in the near term.”
The president made the statement Tuesday after sharply criticizing the Netanyahu government’s aggressive judicial overhaul plans that have sparked massive popular protests in Israel in recent days and concerns about a potential curtailment of democracy in the Mideast nation.
Critics, meanwhile, say that while Mr. Biden deserves credit for trying to rally democracies, the administration’s reluctance to call out authoritarian backsliding among some U.S. allies could undercut the democracy summit’s legitimacy and give fodder to anti-American messaging such as that emanating from Beijing and Moscow.
In the difficult calculus between values and interests, the administration has largely “shied away” from confrontations with key allies and individual autocratic leaders, favoring security and economic concerns over governance issues, argues Jon Temin, a former State Department official now serving as vice president of policy and programs at the Truman Center for National Policy.
The Biden administration “said little publicly about democratic regression in Turkey, Hungary and Poland before Russia invaded Ukraine and has said almost nothing about it since,” Mr. Temin wrote this week in an article published by Foreign Affairs under the headline: “The U.S. Doesn’t Need Another Democracy Summit; It Needs a Plan to Confront Authoritarianism.”
Mr. Temin further argued that “to mount a credible defense of democracy abroad, Washington and its partners would need to challenge authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning governments, not just bolster democratic reformers.”
Changed world
Mr. Biden’s first democracy summit in December 2021 met under strikingly different circumstances — countries were facing the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was still two months away, and the rhetorical and strategic animosity between China and the U.S. had not reached today’s fever pitch.
“Since the last summit for democracy two years ago, the world has changed dramatically,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told the summit. “For decades, the idea of war in Europe seemed unthinkable. But we were wrong as Russia’s brutalization of Ukraine has shown we cannot assume that democracy, freedom and security are givens, that they are eternal.”
Mr. Biden appears to have sharpened his own rhetoric, while sending a message that the summit is not a U.S.-run show: Washington was the sole host of the 2021 summit, but this time the U.S. is sharing hosting duties with Costa Rica, the Netherlands, South Korea and Zambia.
“Worldwide, we see autocrats violating human rights and suppressing fundamental freedoms, … with corruption eating away at young people’s faith in their future [and] citizens questioning whether democracy can still deliver on the issues that matter most to their lives and to their livelihoods,” Mr. Blinken said at Tuesday’s pre-summit virtual event.
But the widening competition between the West and Beijing for the global narrative reflects what some analysts describe as a growing alignment of the world’s top autocracies — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — brought closer together by Moscow’s war in Ukraine and Washington’s success in rallying NATO and other allies to support Kyiv.
More broadly, the Russia-Ukraine war has heightened the stakes of uncertainty about Washington’s ability to not only lead a democratic world order but also forge a united front with other key governments in an increasingly turbulent era of great-power competition.
The U.S. and Europe have mostly been in lockstep on countering China’s rise and have responded collectively to the Russia-Ukraine war, but some warn that Western messaging is falling flat with many emerging global players.
With that as a backdrop, the Biden administration has sought to widen the tent of this year’s summit, inviting representatives from eight countries that weren’t invited to the inaugural 2021 summit: Bosnia and Herzegovina., Gambia, Honduras, Ivory Coast, Lichtenstein, Mauritania, Mozambique, and Tanzania.
But the controversies of the messaging and the guest list continue.
Pakistan announced Tuesday it was turning down an invitation to participate in this week’s summit, a move seen in part as an effort to avoid angering China, a major trading and investment partner.
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
