By AARON MAK
May 08, 2016
TAIPEI, Taiwan — After months of lamenting that “we are being ripped so badly by China” in trade and that it is “playing us like a fiddle” in dealing with North Korea, Donald Trump took his tough-on-China rhetoric to new extremes last week, declaring on Sunday, “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country” with trade deficits. “It’s the greatest theft in the history of the world,” the presumptive Republican nominee said.
By Tuesday, Trump’s vulgar metaphor was the fourth-most-discussed topic on the Chinese Twitter equivalent Weibo, but the reactions in Chinese media and social media have been surprisingly tepid. Most Weibo comments consist of guffawing emojis and crude jokes. The Global Times, the state-run conservative tabloid, argued that Sino-American trade has in fact benefited the United States, all while still dismissing Trump’s statement as a mere ploy to rally his populist base. On the state-managed Chinese news website Interface, one article even touted the “rape” comment as cause for a Trump presidency: Better for the U.S. president to care about business deals than aggressively promoting America’s democratic values abroad or bolstering U.S. allies in Asia.
If you’ve been paying any attention to Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail, you might imagine China would be quaking in its boots. Rarely has a candidate so relentlessly attacked a peaceful trade partner. Trump has accused China of manipulating its currency and stealing American jobs, and promised a 45 percent tariff on all Chinese goods—intended to devastate the country’s export-driven economy. He has even tweeted far more about China than about any other of his favorite foreign nemeses like Mexico or ISIS.
These attacks have worried economists, diplomats and free-trade advocates. But one group that seems surprisingly sanguine is the Chinese people.
Even as China’s government has refused to comment on Trump’s diatribes, a survey of both official state media and social media networks reveals that a growing contingent of Chinese believe the mogul’s potential presidency could actually end up benefiting China—perhaps more so than a President Hillary Clinton, whose criticism of the country’s human rights record infuriates Chinese leaders. Some Chinese admire Trump’s glitzy businesses, big-name brand and candid personality. Others genuinely think the candidate’s “America First” foreign policy positions would give China the upper hand in Sino-American relations and allow more room for China to assert itself on the world stage.
It didn’t start out this way. In the early days of the campaign, government-run news outlets tended to paint Trump as “a buffoon or a joke,” as Xincheng Shen, a U.S.-based writer for state-managed news site The Paper, told me. But as Trump has racked up more primary wins and asserted his foreign policy positions, China’s state outlets have grown more receptive. Among layman pundits on Chinese social media, the support has been even stronger. On Weibo, the candidate has inspired popular groups such as “Trump Fan Club” and“Great Man Donald Trump.” In a late March poll of 3,330 Global Times readers, 54 percent of respondents said they supported a Trump presidency—well above the roughly 40 percent of Americans who currently do.
“Trump is very, very popular among Chinese Internet users,” says Kecheng Fang, a former reporter in China who now researches Chinese media at the University of Pennsylvania.
Much of the Trump support in China boils down to his reputation overseas as a shrewd entrepreneur—an image that surely resonates with China’s plutocrats and aspirers. (“China today has this obsession with successful businessmen,” Shen notes.) Over the past decade, the Trump brand has been making inroads in the Chinese market, with the mogul promoting his Southeast Asia and U.S. luxury hotels specifically to Chinese travelers, in addition to looking for new locations in Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai. Trump himself has boasted about doing business with Chinese companies and leasing real estate to Chinese patrons. “I do great with China. I sell them condos. I have the largest bank in the world from China, the largest in the world by far,” he claimed last week. “They’re a tenant of mine in a building I own in Manhattan.”
Trump’s reality TV show, The Apprentice, also has a following in China, as does his daughter, Ivanka Trump, whose high-life-oriented Weibo account has 15,000 fans. The image of success and opulence that Trump cultivates has even led some Chinese businesses to coopt his surname—from the luxury toilet seat manufacturer Shenzhen Trump Industries to the Henan real estate firm Trump Consulting to the Anhui air purifier producer Trump Electronics.
Beyond just Trump’s brand, many Chinese believe his business acumen would translate into political pragmatism on matters of national security and foreign policy—which would play to China’s advantage. Trump has repeatedly questioned the wisdom of maintaining American military bases and warships in the region, arguing that they cost the United States money while allowing allies like Japan to mooch off American support in their squabbles with China in the East and South China seas. “If we’re attacked, they do not have to come to our defense,” Trump told the New York Times in late March. “If they’re attacked, we have to come totally to their defense. And that is a—that’s a real problem.”
Chinese state media have responded favorably to this rhetoric; China clearly sees U.S. armed forces in the area as a nuisance, if not a threat, and with American and Chinese warships patrolling the same crowded waterways, the two countries have been playing a risky game of chicken. A Global Times op-ed published a day after Trump’s Times interview reads, “It is hence predictable that if Trump is elected president, he will choose to cooperate with China, from which Japan will fail to benefit.”
That leaves room for China to assert itself. An article published last month in the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, noted that Trump’s snubs toward America’s Asian allies, namely Japan and South Korea, will allow China to become the dominant military power in the Pacific. Because the South China Sea isn’t oil rich, a Trump-led military would likely turn its attention away from Asia and toward the Middle East, says Shen, who last month published a widely circulated article in The Paper headlined “Do Not Rush to Say Trump Is Crazy.” “It seems like [Trump] only wants to get involved in something militarily when there is a business benefit,” Shen argues.
On economic issues, Trump has been much more aggressively anti-China; his tax and anti-currency manipulation proposals have even raised the prospect of a trade war. But many Chinese observers see these “tough” positions as bluster—part of Trump’s appeal to Republican voters at home—and believe he would soften his stance once in office. For one thing, his opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a multinational trade deal meant to counterbalance China’s economic dominance in the region—has led some in Chinese statemedia to believe Trump would be more open to commercial relations with China than he lets off.
A recent People’s Daily article argued further that the likelihood of Trump actually causing a crisis with China has been exaggerated by the American media. (The inevitable imprecision of translation could also be a factor, Shen points out; certain Mandarin words, such as the word for “liar,” lack the political impact of their English equivalents.)
Part of the reason for Trump’s appeal in China has to do with China’s intense skepticism toward the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency. The “pivot to Asia”—a push during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state to increase America’s military presence and advance human rights in the region—has long been a source of anxiety for the Chinese, who see it as an attempt by the United States to control and suppress China’s rise. That policy, which Chinese associate closely with Clinton, has caused “dissatisfaction among Chinese netizens,” Wu Xinbo, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, recently told the Global Times, “while Trump’s outspokenness and straightforwardness have gained him more support.”
Clinton has also criticized China for human rights violations and online censorship since her days as first lady and later at Foggy Bottom, leading some Chinese netizens and state media outlets to believe she would be more ideological and less flexible than Trump in diplomatic dealings with China. “Unlike traditional idealistic politicians, who tend to place ideological values, such as democracy and human rights, as the priority in their diplomacy, Trump has more realistic interests in mind,” a recent op-ed in the Global Times says.
In fact, Trump’s apparently pliable views on human rights (he has expressed interest in bringing back torture, for one) and disregard for traditional bounds of discussion in American politics have helped him win fans from the more nationalistic corners of Chinese social media. In China, a strain of Islamophobia has emerged in response to both terror attacks abroad and outrage at Chinese affirmative-action policies that favor Muslim students in the scoring of the gaokao, the standardized college entrance exam. “Many Chinese share Trump’s anti-Muslim and anti-political-correctness sentiment,” says Fang, who has followed Trump-related discussions on Zhihu, China’s Quora equivalent. One particularly popular Zhihu post in support of Trump’s policy to ban Muslims from entering the United States reads, “A Western civilization dominated by political correctness is […] doomed to die.” The post received almost 10,000 upvotes.
It would be a mistake, of course, to overstate Trump’s popularity in China. The Chinese media landscape is massive and does have its fair share of anti-Trump doomsayers who portray him as a racist clown. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, China’s finance minister, Lou Jiwei, became a rare Chinese officials to comment on Trump, calling him an “irrational type.” And the candidate’s recent suggestion that Japan and South Korea build up their own nuclear arsenals to supplant U.S. support in the region has caused some sincere alarm, with the Global Times calling the remark “reckless.”
But often the anti-Trumpism comes with a dash of anti-Americanism: Numerous Chinese journalists have pointed to Trump’s rise as evidence of the inherent faults in the American political system, chalking up his success to the failure of the democratic system to give the middle-class a voice in politics. The People’s Daily has pointed to the disillusionment of young American voters as fuel for Trump’s rise, while the Global Times has cast Trump in a cautionary tale about the perils of populism. “Trump and [Bernie] Sanders’ rise clearly shows that Americans have lost confidence in their political system,” the author wrote.
Which is only a good thing for China. “Our nation’s strength is growing, while America’s is declining,” a recent article in the tabloid reads. When it comes to Trump, America’s loss may be China’s gain.
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