China: Kyle Rittenhouse Proves U.S. Democracy ‘Has Failed’

China’s state-run Global Times on Sunday claimed the Kyle Rittenhouse trial “exposes the illness of the U.S. political system” and argued the not-guilty verdict proves American democracy “has failed to heal the illness of social polarization and racial divergence.”

As with many Chinese propaganda publications, the Global Times editorial largely regurgitated the obsessions and criticisms of far-left U.S. media, mixed with confident declarations from “Chinese experts” that America’s bitter divisions have sealed its doom. 

Justin Blake marches in Kenosha to “Black Economic Attack” on a car lot following the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict. (Randy Clark/Breitbart Texas — AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

That is how the Chinese paper saw evidence of “racial divergence” in the trial of a white youth who shot three white men in self-defense, and repeatedly muttered the Rittenhouse jury “appeared to be overwhelmingly white.” American media figures keep saying things like that, so Chinese state media says it, too.

The “Chinese experts” sagely concluded America will remain divided until it wises up and embraces one-party authoritarianism like China:

Chinese analysts said that cases such as this which could spark conflicts and violence in the US will increase as both the Democrats and the Republicans want to make the best use of the divergence between left and right, black and white, rather than heal and unify the society, because the two parties survive on and profit from worsening social divisions.

This is an illness that is deeply rooted in the bones of the US’ two-party political system. “US democracy” is losing the ability to solve such a problem and more similar cases will take place in the future, observers noted.

In China, by contrast, there is very little racial strife because troublesome minorities are forced into concentration camps and used as slave labor. Imagine how much chaos and division there might be in Chinese politics if groups like the Uyghurs and Tibetans had inalienable rights and enjoyed political representation!

A demonstrator wearing a mask attends a protest of supporters of the mostly Muslim Uighur minority and Turkish nationalists to denounce China’s treatment of ethnic Uighur Muslims during a deadly riot in July 2009 in Urumqi, in front of the Chinese consulate in Istanbul, on July 5, 2018. (Photo credit should read OZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty Images)

The Global Times editors rambled across the social and legacy media landscape, repeating everything they could find that sounded bad for America without putting much effort into building a coherent critique.

Thus, the same editorial sang the praises of iron-fisted single-party despotism and quoted Jesse Jackson absurdly warning the Rittenhouse verdict makes it “open season on human rights demonstrators.” Jackson should pay a visit to Hong Kong if he wants to see what open season on human rights demonstrators actually looks like.

“A criminal trial should have had its own judgment criteria and strictly follow legal procedures, but as partisan rivalry in the U.S. intensifies, the Rittenhouse case turned into a political issue with racial conflict and gun control involved, and therefore became a stage for the Democrats and the Republicans to propagate their political views and attack each other,” the Global Times asserted.

As things worked out, Rittenhouse did get a criminal trial that strictly followed legal procedures – and since it was held in America rather than China, citizens are permitted to criticize the verdict.