U.S. Presidential Debate Inspires Schadenfreude in China
Many Chinese took to social media to heap scorn on both candidates
In September, Chinese students chat as they watch the year's first U.S. presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
In China, the second Clinton-Trump debate provided a fresh opportunity to lambaste U.S. democracy, with many Chinese taking to social media to heap scorn on both presidential candidates.
“China’s leaders are picked from the ground level up, and their quality is so much better than America’s,” wrote one user of Chinese social-media platform Weibo.
“What with Brexit and the Colombia peace plan vote,” wrote another, “I celebrate the fact that China isn’t ‘one person, one vote.’”
A recent Pew survey found that Chinese respondents viewed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton slightly more favorably than her opponent. One Weibo user said he backed Republican nominee Donald Trump, not because he’d be a good president, but because “the world needs that kind of political idiot in order to lead the U.S. astray”
The comments followed Chinese state media commentary over a weekend marked by furor over the Washington Post’s release of a 2005 video in which Donald Trump bragged about groping women.
“Not only do all kinds of strange phenomena show the embarrassing predicament of the U.S. political class, they also point to the flaws of the U.S. political system,” wrote the mouthpiece of China’s ruling Communist Party, the People’s Daily.
Chinese state media regularly opines that U.S. democracy is a corrupt institution that serves only the wealthy.
The People’s Daily editorial included a laundry list of problems it said the U.S. was facing. “In the context of an unbalanced economic recovery, U.S. politics have gotten polarized, the middle class is declining, guns are spreading unchecked, while problems like racism have gotten worse and worse,” it declared.
Another state-backed tabloid, the Global Times, seemed to reserve some sympathy for the Republican nominee. Like Mr. Trump, it suggested that media “elites” had decided to sink his campaign, declaring that the latest scandal “also reveals the dark side of U.S. mainstream elites.” The clash between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump was one between “pro-establishment forces and real change,” it wrote.
“Even if Trump loses, he is a rare political specimen, and rebellion from the middle and lower classes against the elites will not die down,” the publication said. “This is, indeed, an American election that’s great to watch,” it concluded.
Asked for comment on the election and Mr. Trump’s 2005 remarks on women at a regular news briefing Monday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said, “We won’t comment on the progress of U.S. elections.”
Certain Chinese Weibo commenters on the U.S. election felt inspired to use analogies drawn from gastronomy, including one likening the choice of candidates to one between “moldy bread and expired sausage.”
Still, some said that it was better than living in a system without choice. “Everyone’s smearing American democracy, but let’s not brainlessly do so. The world doesn’t have a single country that’s perfect….I want to ask, what country does it better than U.S. democracy?”