US President Joe Biden said Wednesday he still believes Chinese President Xi Jinping is a dictator, even as the two leaders made progress in their relationship during a meeting outside San Francisco.
“Well, look, he’s a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours,” Biden told CNN’s MJ Lee. “Anyway, we made progress.”
When asked about Biden’s latest comment at a Chinese Foreign Ministry briefing on Thursday, a spokesperson called it “extremely erroneous” and an “irresponsible political maneuver, which China firmly opposes.”
This is basically the Democratic Socialist argument against China. If democracy is a prerequisite for “true socialism”, then the USA is actually closer to achieving that than China.
A few things:
Democratic Socialism isn’t necessarily the only democratic form of Socialism. DemSoc refers to a Socialist system with Liberal Democracy, as opposed to forms like ParEcon, Council Communism, Syndicalism, Soviet Democracy, etc.
Secondly, technically China subscribes to a form of Democracy, based on the concept of Democratic Centralism.
I personally don’t think the US or China is actually very Democratic, neither are truly accountable to the will of the people. The US is slightly more democratic, but it isn’t saying much.
Agree with almost everything you said, didn’t mean to come off like I was saying Democratic Socialism is the only form of Socialism with Democracy. I used democratic socialism use DemSocs are a bit more prevalent.
I am always dubious of “Democratic Centralism” though, at least in mainstream ML parties. Always seems to be a way to ban factionalism and therefore any opinion dissenting from the party line.