On Tuesday, Donald Trump was elected the next president of the United States. The election had been closely observed from China, by both the government and the populace.
The Chinese government’s official response has so far been muted. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “We respect the choice of the American people and congratulate Mr. Trump on being elected as president of the United States.” Xi Jinping later called Donald Trump to congratulate him on his victory and express hope for this new period in U.S.-China relations. Trump’s election did not catch the Chinese government by surprise, reported Sylvie Zhuang of the South China Morning Post:
Discussions on how to prepare for the possibility of a second Trump term began in the spring, according to an official overseeing research.
[…A source familiar with the situation] added that he believed Chinese officials were also looking into the prominent role that the world’s richest person – Elon Musk – had played, as well as his ties with China.
[…] According to a Chinese researcher from a top national social science research body in Beijing, over the past several months, all of the nation’s top international relations think tanks have been asked to submit papers to the Communist Party’s leadership with their best educated guesses on prospective cabinet members under both Trump and Harris, as well as their individual positions on China. [Source]
Online, Chinese state media denigrated the election as yet another sign of American chaos. China News Service, the second largest state news agency, shared a widely derided video to Weibo that billed itself as “a three-minute explainer of American election chaos.” The video, which led with a quote from the longtime state-media favorite series “House of Cards,” asserted that the victor, whether Trump or Harris, would simply be “the face of the ruling elite, leaving ordinary people as mere spectators.” One Weibo user left the acerbic comment: “So no elections means no chaos?”
To many on Weibo, the election was little more than an opportunity to post memes about the battle between the “Know-it-all King” (懂王, dǒngwáng) and “Auntie Haha” (哈哈姐, hāhājiě)—the former a riff on Trump’s penchant for claiming he knows more about any given subject than anybody, and the latter a derisive reference to Trump’s attacks on Harris’ laugh. Many joked that Trump was one of the “re-employed senior citizens” that a top Communist Party official suggested might alleviate China’s domestic economic woes this past May.
Darker currents of thought surfaced, as well. China’s online “manosphere” celebrated Trump’s victory as a strike against Chinese feminists. One Chinese man wrote, “If Auntie Haha had won, China’s feminazis would’ve gotten even crazier.” Some even more extreme comments proved popular. A well-known Weibo user wrote, “I can’t wait for Trump to start the purge, the public won’t submit without killings. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!” (The final bloody injunction to “kill, kill, kill” is a reference to the online “Xianzhong” phenomenon, in which some social media users laud “revenge against society” attacks by invoking the mass slaughter perpetrated by Zhang Xianzhong, leader of a peasant rebellion during the Ming-Qing transition.) Below the “kill, kill” comment, one approving reader responded, “All the feminist bloggers crashed out this afternoon, how delightful.”
For China’s nationalists, Trump’s history was a herald of victories yet to come. A Reuters report about Elon Musk’s company SpaceX asking suppliers to relocate manufacturing away from Taiwan was of particular interest to many nationalists. Musk, a top Trump backer, has close business ties to China. A popular comment under a Global Times Weibo post about Musk’s request aptly summarized the general sentiment: “The ‘Return’ is already marked on the calendar,” a reference to a future potential People’s Republic of China takeover of Taiwan. Another Weibo user wrote at greater length that the news means “Taiwan will run out of runway over these next four years. All of the island’s industries will be gradually forced out of Taiwan by pressure from the Trump team. At the same time, Taiwan will impoverish itself buying expensive American weapons systems and paying America protection fees.”
At The Wall Street Journal, Brian Spegele and Austin Ramzy reported that despite Trump’s frequent criticism of China as a threat, his personal admiration for Xi Jinping and past criticism of Taiwan might signal an erosion of U.S. support for the democratic island nation:
Trump, in contrast [to Biden], has been more critical of the island democracy, calling on it to pay more for its own defense. He has also accused Taiwan, which is a world leader in semiconductor manufacturing, of stealing American jobs.
Though many of Trump’s foreign-policy advisers have made high-profile visits to Taiwan and criticized Biden for not doing enough to support Taiwan, Trump himself has highlighted Taiwan’s proximity to the Chinese mainland—and its distance from the U.S.—in recent interviews.
“Taiwan is obviously going to be concerned,” said Wen-ti Sung, a Taipei-based nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. “Trump has made it clear he doesn’t distinguish between friends and foes, he manages relationships.”
Taiwan could be at a disadvantage in such an equation, Sung said. “If pay-to-play is the name of the game, then whoever has the biggest purse will likely fare better,” Sung said. “China is many times bigger, so Taiwan has reason to be concerned about its capacity to match China in winning U.S. friendship under Trump.” [Source]
