On March 27, Myanmar’s military wantonly massacred the masses going on a demonstration, killing almost 90 people. It has been the bloodiest day since the outbreak of the democratic movement in early February, prompting various European countries and the US to condemn it. Those concerned about developments in Myanmar feel deeply that the pressure exerted on China by the West is also at the stage of diminishing marginal returns, as evidenced by the fact that though protests from the international community over the Myanmar and Xinjiang issue have been relentless, China has never yielded an inch. But why?

The answer to the above question can be found in the meeting held in Alaska on March 18: The actual strengths of China and the US have altered, especially that China has presumed US’s soft power having drastically declined in 2020. Such a proposition made by people like me sojourning in the US that the US political system is decaying is unconvincing, despite irrefutable facts. At last, an organization and a figure that the leftist cannot afford to overlook have come forward to make criticism about it. The organization is called Freedom House, an NGO founded in 1941 when totalitarianism prevailed and having advocated and monitored developments of democracy for decades; the person is named Gerard Baker, former editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal(WSJ).

Freedom House issued a specific report on March 22, pointing out three major issues in the retrogression of US democracy: the unequal treatment encountered by the colored, the undesirable influence of money in politics, and the tension between two parties and extremism. Being understanding about BLM is the prerequisite for being politically correct so that even the introspection done by Freedom House followed that beaten track. Even so, the other two issues are admittedly the grave deficiencies in US political system for the time being. The major methods for improvement put forward by Freedom House are obviously skewed in favor of certain political stance. For example, legalizing the method of ballot-harvesting in the H.R.1. bill carried out by the Democratic Party in 2020 as a method for improvement would just intensify the domestic political conflicts in America.

I do hope Freedom House will mull over US democracy further for two reasons. First, the organization has funded a “study of de-democratization” specifically on the well-developed countries, which ended up a well-known project titled “Democracy, Democratization, De-democratization and their correlations”- the best work accomplished by Charles Tilly, a renowned American political scientist regarded as the “founding father of 21st-century sociology”. There are four signs of de-democratization particularized in the book: 1, degeneration of fair and just election and rigging in general election; 2, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly crippled, which wears down challenges presented by the opposition faction to the government; 3, weakening of checks and balances applied in judicature and bureaucrats, which poses a threat to judicial independence; 4, the government creating, or laying too much emphasis on, threats to national security so as to bring into being a kind of “sense of impending crisis”. All of the above four signs can be found in today’s America.

Furthermore, all the information in the entire book comes from the monitoring conducted by Freedom House for years, and the masterpiece takes the criteria adopted by Freedom House for civil and political rights and civil liberty as a point of reference when evaluating a country’s democratization. The report by Freedom House this time particularly points out: “don’t let any autocratic regime use this as a pretext to make a false and unwarranted declaration that their systems are superior,” which suggests that the organization acknowledges the US democracy is in crisis. But in terms of the content, I reckon that the report fails to impartially recognize the real issues America is encountering like what Tilly made out the real problems other countries were facing.

On March 22, Gerard Baker issued a commentary in WSJ titled Western Culture Elites Are Giving Away Lenin’s Rope. The article is levelled at two incidents: US Vice President Kamala Harris sternly criticizing the US for being a violent and racist country at a video conference with Michael Martin, Ireland’s Prime Minister, and the Sino-US meeting in Alaska on March 18. All the footages had not been broadcast until a few days later that Americans found out the US had been dealt a blow and criticized for having problems in its democracy. The article raises a question at the very beginning: “How can a nation prevail in an ideological struggle when its leaders believe its values are evil?” It also says: “Those who have control over US major cultural institutions and the current government have been forging ideological ropes for Chinese executioners, and speeding up the production of it over the past year.” The entire commentary pungently lambastes the leftist in America for their identity politics, reproaching outright the people going looting during the BLM movement for being hoodlums.

The introspections done by Freedom House and Gerard Baker go to two extremes, with only one common point: both are aware of the severe issue in US democracy. Such a huge rift between the understandings of the root cause of the issue has shown that US democracy is easily reconditioned.

The drastic decline in US soft power has made the country not persuasive anymore in the international community. Like what Baker says in the article, American culture elites are “promoting the victim status to an emblem of modern American honor” – America is degenerating into a society with the characteristics of identity politics of Marxism, which is where the confidence of Yang Jiechi and the like seen at the meeting in Alaska lies.

(He Qinglian, US-based scholar)

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