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BEIJING, Sept 26 The United States' economic woes show the bankruptcy of Western-style democracy while China's Olympic Games triumph shows the growing "superiority" of its Communist Party rule, China's top newspaper said on Friday.
The commentary in the People's Daily appeared a day after China launched its third manned space flight, which state media also celebrated as a display of the ruling Party's power to marshal economic growth for greater national purposes.
The strikingly long essay dwelt on the Beijing Olympic Games in August as proving that China should stick to Party control and avoid the temptations of Western democracy.
"China's unprecedented success in presenting the world with an extraordinary Olympic Games has stunned the West," says the essay by Mei Ninghua, the chief publisher of another major Party newspaper, the Beijing Daily.
"Throughout the Olympics, the Chinese government and people demonstrated their powerful organisational strength and unsurpassed ability to mobilise society ... fully embodying the superiority of China's political system."
Chinese officials repeatedly said the Olympics should have nothing to do with politics, and should not be used as a platform to criticise their restrictions on political life.
But there was no such modesty in this latest survey of the Olympics' lessons, which made no mention of a milk-powder scandal that has made thousands of infants ill and killed at least four, and was covered up for months up until the end of the Games.
Late this year, the Communist Party will mark 30 years since China launched market-driven economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping. Some Party scholars have said the anniversary should be the starting point for liberalising political reforms.
But the republishing of the lengthy comment in Chinese by the Party's top paper -- it first appeared in the Beijing Daily -- suggested China's leaders have no appetite for big political experiments.
Instead, the Party paper argues that the contrast between China in the Games and the United States in its financial mess offers a lesson for the world on what political system works best.
"Western countries are mired in low growth, and the United States' recent severe financial crisis is a manifestation of the dead-end of liberalism and the destruction of the myth of American institutions," it says.
Western electoral democracy fosters corrupt, divisive and inept policy-making, it says. "Hitler came to power through an election, but that did not make the Third Reich a modern state," it adds.
On the other hand, China's ability to foster economic growth and channel the benefits into Olympic Games and other nation-building feats shows it is "superior to the capitalist political system ... and its advantages are increasingly evident." (Reporting by Chris Buckley; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)