Clinton takes sideswipe at Beijing US secretary of state Hillary Clinton took aim at China's model of authoritarian capitalism on Monday, using a trip to Mongolia to press the case for greater democratic freedoms across Asia. Although she did not mention China by name, Mrs Clinton's full-throated defence of democracy in Asia was a direct counter to Chinese arguments that too much political freedom could undermine stability and damage the economy. Democracies, she said, were more politically stable, more reliable neighbours and were better at encouraging innovation. We need to make the 21st century a time in which people across Asia don't only become more wealthy. They must also become more free," Mrs Clinton said in a speech to to a conference on women's issues. She added that recent democratic reforms and elections in Asian countries such as Mongolia, Myanmar and East Timor "stand in stark contrast to those governments that ... work around the clock to restrict people's access to ideas and information, to imprison them for expressing their views, to usurp the rights of citizens to choose their leaders, to govern without accountability, to corrupt the economic progress of the country and take the riches unto themselves." China's leadership transition has been roiled by the downfall of Bo Xilai, the former senior Chinese communist party official whose wife has been accused of involvement in the murder of a British businessman. The scandal has focused Chinese domestic and international attention on the wealth accumulated by some of the country's most powerful political families. Mrs Clinton's comments were part of the growing geopolitical debate pitting the US against China over the future of Asia. She will travel on Tuesday to Vietnam, which has been keen to foster closer ties with the US to balance Chinese influence in the region, and then to Laos, in the first visit by a US secretary of state in 57 years. On Thursday she will attend a meeting of the Asean Regional Forum in Cambodia, where one of the principal topics will be mounting tensions over territorial disputes in the South China Sea. In her speech in Mongolia, Mrs Clinton said that while the expanding US military presence in the Asia-Pacific region had attracted considerable attention, the heart of US strategy in the region was support for democracy and human rights. She added that while some in Asia argued that democracy was a western idea, over the past five years Asia had been the only region in the world to achieve steady gains in political rights and civil liberties. "This is the right time to talk about democracy in Asia," she said. You cannot, over the long run, have economic liberalisation without political liberalisation ... Countries that want to be open for business but closed to free expression will find the approach comes with a cost: it kills innovation and discourages entrepreneurship, which are vital for sustainable growth. The Obama administration is also eager to use this week's visit to emphasise economic links with south-east Asia, where China is the dominant trading partner. In Cambodia, Mrs Clinton will also attend a business forum with a large delegation of US multinationals. Asean countries have been negotiating a code of conduct with China for resolving disputes in the South China Sea. However, the build-up to this year's ARF meeting has been marked by tensions between China and the Philippines over a disputed island. It was at the same forum two years ago that Mrs Clinton in effect launched what is now termed the Obama administration's "pivot" towards Asia, when she declared that the US had an interest in the peaceful resolution of territorial disputes in the South China Sea. China responded furiously to her intervention, accusing the US of trying to divide the region. While the US has been quietly trying to encourage Asean in the code-of-conduct discussions, this year's meeting is not expected to be as confrontational. Senior officials from both China and the US have given speeches in recent days stressing the need to work closely together over regional issues.