China’s government newspaper used the weekend after U. S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration to promote China as an alternative to the “crisis” of Western democracy and capitalism.
“Western-style democracy has played a progressive role in history, but right now it has heavy drawbacks,” Han Zhen, Communist Party secretary of the Beijing Foreign Studies University, wrote in a Chinese editorial in the People’s Daily.
The article and two similar pieces filled up a full page in the government paper on Sunday, and blamed Western democracy and capitalism for global troubles such as the financial crisis and populist movements in the U. S. and Europe. In this context, the editorials said, China could show the benefits of “socialism with Chinese characteristics. ”
Beijing is trying to enter what it sees as a leadership gap created by worries around Trump , said Scott Kennedy, director of the Project on Chinese Business and Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“I think they’re just trying to take advantage of what looks like a disorderly transition in the U. S. and a great anxiety around the world about what a Trump administration looks like,” Kennedy said.
