Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, where China’s anti-democracy “democracy” is being imposed/Reuters

Lisa Van Dusen

December 8, 2021

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in October that his surveillance, social engineering, data harvesting, political propaganda and genocide lubrication platform would henceforth be calling itself “Meta”, a billion eyes rolled.

Then, in a not-The-Onion move more on a sophistry par with Zuckerberg re-branding Facebook as “PrivacynTruth”, China’s State Council — the country’s administrative body, akin to a federal cabinet — released a position paper with the spit-take title “China: Democracy that Works”. “There is no fixed model of democracy; it manifests itself in many forms,” the paper asserts, negating the fact that if Beijing did not know exactly what democracy is, it could not have spent the past 20 years undermining it, from America to Hong Kong to Zimbabwe.

China’s absurd attempt at democracy appropriation was the latest in a series of pre-emptive propaganda strikes aimed at President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy, to be held virtually this Thursday and Friday, and whose apparent ability to freak out Beijing — along with every other belligerent, covert and overt, in the war on democracy — before it even starts speaks volumes about the aspiring world order paranoia provoked by the system it aims to replace.

This attempt to blur the enormous differences between democracy and totalitarianism — differences so crucial to quality of life that human beings have been willing to die defending them for centuries — by arbitrarily re-branding China as a democracy is excellent news for Biden, for the liberal world order in general and for democracy in particular. When your chief geopolitical rival and systemic antagonist concedes your superiority by attempting to zip on a fake you suit, you know you’ve won. Identity theft may not be the sincerest form of flattery but it is the most craven.

China’s democracy redefining gambit falls within the realm of hybrid warfare.

Per NATO’s definition, “Hybrid methods of warfare, such as propaganda, deception, sabotage and other non-military tactics have long been used to destabilise adversaries. What is new about attacks seen in recent years is their speed, scale and intensity, facilitated by rapid technological change and global interconnectivity.”

When your chief geopolitical rival and systemic antagonist concedes your superiority by attempting to zip on a fake-you suit, you know you’ve won.

In other words, the vast preponderance of warfare in these post-internet times — much of it conducted using  intelligence tactics deployed by corrupt covert players — including domination-seeking tactical sabotage, propaganda posing as journalism, surveillance and hacking-based subterfuge, corruption-driven election outcomes, corruption-captured judicial rulings and other key anti-democracy “victories”, falls under the definition of hybrid warfare.

So, China displaying the shamelessness required to self-identify as a democracy against every single iota of available evidence is entirely in keeping with the broader shamelessness of anti-democracy narrative warfare, including the intelligence-insulting, delusional dogma embraced by its practitioners that “reality is what we say it is” and the motivating precept that the ends justify any means necessary.

In fact, China calling itself a democracy is a net positive for democracy, not a negative. It expresses Beijing’s insecurity about a system it sees as an existential threat, its contempt for not just its own citizens who’ve been oppressed, suppressed, silenced, surveiled, hacked, sorted, persecuted, imprisoned, exploited and extra-judicially incarcerated but for human beings worldwide who know better.

It’s Xi Jinping’s way of saying “The truth is, we completely understand and appreciate the enormous value of this thing we’ve been degrading for years, so much so that we’ll try to put it on like a wig. After all, how can the people of China demand something we tell them they already have?”

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.