Donald Trump's election claims feed Russia and China's disinformation narrative about dangers of democracy
FirstpostLike the Russian news media, Chinese outlets emphasised the potential for political violence in the United States all last week as the vote counts trickled in For years, State propaganda in both Russia and China has painted Western democracy as dangerously chaotic compared to what it described as the safety and stability of the countries’ authoritarian systems. On the flagship weekly news program on State TV Sunday night, host Dmitry Kiselyov said the election showed the United States to be “not a country but a huge, chaotic communal apartment, with a criminal flair.” On a political talk show, a lawmaker, Oleg Morozov, said American democracy had deteriorated to the point that “one can manipulate it, tune it, tamper with it to achieve a certain result.” In Russia, elections are tightly scripted affairs, with challengers to the ruling party winning in very rare cases and popular Opposition politicians generally unable to get on the ballot. Southern Daily, an official newspaper for the southern province of Guangdong, said that while Biden would most likely treat Russia, not China, as the biggest foreign threat to the United States, “we don’t have to have illusions.” “One thing is for sure, things will never return to the way they were before,” the newspaper’s post on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, continued. “The world is not the world it was before.” Like the Russian news media, Chinese outlets emphasised the potential for political violence in the United States all last week as the vote counts trickled in.