The Chinese leadership and Donald Trump are both realists. The Chinese are very realistic about how the world works. They are not naive like the people who govern America and think the world wants western democratic values. Vladimir Putin of Russia is another realist. That’s why he understands Trump and is not threatened by him.
The people who are threatened by Trump are those who can’t handle reality — that races are different, that different groups have different interests, and that life is a fierce competition for survival between peoples with conflicting interests.
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.”…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.”
…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.
As Trump has become more successful as a politician, the Chinese have respected him more.
