Source: Time
As the world digested the reality of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, the glee among China’s political establishment was hard to contain. “China is feeling a little bit delighted,” says Shen Dingli, deputy dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.
The giddiness comes in various forms. First, what better advertisement for the stable, technocratic authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party than an America so divided that half the electorate failed to recognize how disenfranchised the rest of the nation felt?
“Trump’s election shows the problem of American democracy,” says Yu Tiejun, a professor of international studies at Peking University in Beijing.
The Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party-linked tabloid, opined that the U.S. president-elect “was known for being a blowhard and an egomaniac. But if such a person can be president, there is something wrong with the existing political order.”
“There is a lot of Chinese schadenfreude about the lowly nature of the debate in the U.S. election campaign,” says Paul Haenle, director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing. “It’s a total gift to Chinese propaganda.”
Second, Trump has shown little interest in holding China accountable for its human-rights record, even as President Xi Jinping has tightened control on free-thinkers who speak out against the ruling Chinese Communist Party. During the campaign, Trump even lauded the steeliness of the Chinese leadership for ordering the 1989 massacre of Tiananmen democracy protesters.
“Trump doesn’t care about whether China is an authoritarian state,” says Qiao Mu, media-studies professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, who is no longer allowed to teach because of his outspokenness on political issues.
Compare that to Hillary Clinton, whose public objections to the Chinese Communist Party go back decades, from her critical speech at the 1995 U.N. Women’s Conference in Beijing to her tenure as U.S. Secretary of State.
“Trump is not going to be as harsh on human rights as Hillary Clinton would have been,” says Zhang Ming, a professor at the Institute of Political Studies at Renmin University in Beijing.
Third, while Barack Obama talked about pivoting toward Asia—a foreign-policy maneuver that the Chinese saw as little more than containment—Trump campaigned on isolationism. He has scorned the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the 12-nation trading bloc that was supposed to add economic ballast to Obama’s Asia pivot. Trump has also threatened to tear up defense treaties with America’s Asian allies, such as Japan and South Korea.
“The Chinese like that Trump talks about America growing inward, that the U.S. is overreached in the Middle East, that he’s ripping up TPP, that he’s not paying much attention in Asia,” says Haenle. “Trump says we need to pull back. All that sounds great to the Chinese.”
Categories: America, Asia, China, The Muslim Times, USA