China sees America as a nation in decline: a rich country too divided, selfish and racist to keep its citizens safe
China prefer as America’s next president? That is a hard question, without an uplifting answer. In elite circles in Beijing, both President Donald Trump and his rival, Joe Biden, a former vice-president, are spoken of with distrust and condescension. Rather unusually, both candidates are known quantities. Each man has spent many hours with President Xi Jinping.
Chinese disdain combines the political with the personal. In the unmarked villas, private dining rooms and scholarly retreats where—when it suits them—well-connected Chinese sometimes offer opinions to foreigners, Mr Trump is called ignorant, erratic and tiresome, but not without his uses. He is praised for an apparent indifference to ideology. He is complimented for his reluctance to condemn Chinese repression in such places as Xinjiang.
Chinese leaders initially mistook Mr Trump for a pragmatic tycoon, a type they have met before. Now he is called a narcissist who cares only about his own interests, starting with his re-election. That cynicism informs China’s response to the trade war unleashed by Mr Trump, with wary but bipartisan support from members of Congress and some American business lobbies. Plenty of American businessfolk have swallowed qualms about Mr Trump’s tactics.
As for Mr Biden, in Beijing he is called a member of the former ruling establishment that saw economic interdependence with China as a source of stability, not danger. Mr Biden was a player in Obama-era campaigns to seek China’s help in tackling climate change and other global challenges. Yet, in China, there is strikingly little nostalgia for those days. Some grumble that such engagement rested on a mistaken American belief that China would converge politically with the West as it grew richer.
Just as bipartisan opinion in Washington has coalesced around alarm at China’s rise, an elite consensus has emerged in the Chinese capital. Especially in this summer of pandemic and street protests, America is called a nation in decline: a rich country too divided, selfish and racist to keep its citizens safe. Chinese elites see Mr Trump as a symptom and an agent of that decline. State media long refrained from direct attacks on Mr Trump. Not now.
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