Chinese state media outlets have been bursting with criticism for President Donald Trump during the current round of riots, but the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also tossed a few bricks at former President Barack Obama and his Democrat Party, needling them for doing little about racial issues and touting China’s efforts to care for its poor and disenfranchised as vastly superior to the Democrats’ half-hearted socialism.

China – the country that throws its minorities into concentration camps and uses them for slave labor, the brutal authoritarian regime driven by Han Chinese racial supremacist ideology, the government that thinks nothing of wiping out entire villages if it needs to build a few dams quickly to put on a good show for the Olympics – boasted of its superior compassion and tolerance in the pages of the CCP’s Global Times on Monday:

During the riots, a large part of the protesters’ grievances came from the fact that they, as the people at the bottom, suffered most of the pain caused by the novel coronavirus epidemic. Because the campaign strategy of the president’s team is to downplay the pain of the epidemic, the White House has rarely mentioned the epidemic in the past week, except when it needed to exploit the virus to attack China.

The US is not there for ethnic minorities and poor people. Through the epidemic and the attitude of the ruling elites in the riots, people can see that these groups live in desperation. Because the poor have no way to unite under the US system and can easily be divided, their common dissatisfaction has a limited impact on elections, and they have never become the focus of attention of policymakers.

China’s massive poverty alleviation program is just unthinkable in the US. The frosty attitude of capitalism against the vulnerable groups has been laid bare in the past few months. The poor in the US are experiencing a very bad 2020.

According to the Global Times, this sorry state of affairs in the United States is an inevitable result of multi-party democracy. If America was smart and had only a single party like China, partisan squabbles would be ended and so much more could be done for the poor by their efficient and unified authoritarian government.

“Partisan politics has created severe divisions in society,” the Communist paper lectured. “Such divisions restrict and disturb people’s thinking. People’s support for a particular party is only a matter of stance, which provides a shelter to politicians who violate people’s interests. As elections come and go, it is simply about one group of elites replacing the other. The intertwined interests between the two groups are much greater than those between the victorious one and the electorate who vote for them.”

China appears to be feeding off similar complaints from the left in the United States. Complaints about partisan “gridlock” are perennial and grow especially loud when Democrats and their highly sympathetic media are the ones complaining about Republicans getting in their way. Left-wingers daydreamed during the Obama years about how much good their noble president could do if he possessed the dictatorial powers of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. 

“One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages,” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in September 2009, laying out the thesis for much of his political coverage of the Obama administration.

It will come as a great disappointment to those who share Friedman’s admiration for the reasonably enlightened rulers of China that they do not think much of how Barack Obama handled racial issues during his presidency. 

Another Global Times editorial on Tuesday chided the American media for forgetting that “the country’s escalating racial tension is not only Trump’s fault,” but also “stems from years of negligence by the Obama administration.”

The Global Times cited polls that showed “one of the highest levels of discord since the 1992 riots in Los Angeles” was reached during the last year of the Obama administration and that Americans were generally disappointed with Obama’s handling of racial issues at the end of his term compared to their lofty expectations at the beginning. It further quoted a BBC analysis that dinged Obama for being in charge when the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement began.

“With these facts and arguments in mind, it is reasonable to doubt a Biden presidency, should he win this November, will put more focus on healing race relations than Obama’s two terms of presidency – especially with the coronavirus still wreaking havoc throughout the country and a roiling recession with no easy end in sight,” the CCP paper said.

“The fact that George Floyd’s tragic death happened in a ‘blue state,’ in a Democrat-controlled city, is adding another layer of doubt whether a Biden presidency will offer anything significant better than Obama, or Trump,” the Global Times added.

The article concluded with another variation on the CCP’s theme that the American system is inferior to China’s brand of one-party fascist rule: “African Americans, as well as other minorities who suffer inequality, won’t see their agony end if they are stuck choosing either group of politicians. But what other option do they have?”