Xu Lin, vice minister of the Publicity Department of the Central Committee of China's Communist Party holds a copy of a government-produced report titled "Democracy that Works" during a press conference at the State Council Information Office in Beijing, on Dec. 4, 2021. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

       BEIJING (AP) -- China's Communist Party took American democracy to task on Saturday, sharply criticizing a global democracy summit being hosted by President Joe Biden next week and extolling the virtues of its governing system.

       Party officials questioned how a polarized country that botched its response to COVID-19 could lecture others and said that efforts to force others to copy the Western democratic model are "doomed to fail."

       Tian Peiyan, the deputy director of the party's Policy Research Office, said the pandemic exposed defects in the American system. He blamed the high COVID-19 death toll in the U.S. on political disputes and a divided government from the highest to the lowest levels.

       "Such democracy brings not happiness but disaster to voters," he said at a news conference to release a government report on what the Communist Party calls its form of democracy, which is firmly under party control.

       Biden, who has made a competition between democracies and autocracies a central theme of his presidency, has invited about 110 governments to a two-day virtual "Summit for Democracy" starting Thursday. Neither China nor Russia have been invited.

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