China tantalized by mayhem of US election and prospect of ‘thug’ Trump as president
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His detractors concur that Donald Trump is the most unpalatable candidate for the White House in the history of the United States.
But almost 8,000km away in Beijing, China’s authoritarian rulers appear to think he might be just the man for the job.
Veteran pekingologists suspect the Chinese leadership has been secretly rooting for a Trump victory, wagering his elevation to the Oval Office would strike a body blow to their greatest rival.
“It was Mao Zedong who said: ‘Without destruction there can be no construction’. And, if I interpret him correctly, Donald Trump is the suicide bomber of American politics,” said Orville Schell, the head of the Centre on US-China Relations at New York’s Asia Society.
“He wants to just bring the whole house down and start over. And I think there is an element [of that] that is quite tantalizing to China.”
Schell noted how China’s strongman president, Xi Jinping, had repeatedly declared himself a fan of Chairman Mao’s teachings.
Donald Trump is the suicide bomber of American politics
Orville Schell, New York’s Asia Society
“And of course the key principle of Mao’s rule was “da nao tian gong” – “make disorder under heaven”. I think Trump has every promise of doing that in America.”
Harvard University’s Roderick MacFarquhar is another veteran China scholar who suspects the Communist party has been crossing its fingers for a Trump triumph.
“I think they would see him as an enormous opportunity,” said MacFarquhar, a former Labour party MP, adding: “I don’t think they’d see Hillary as any kind of opportunity at all.”
Party newspapers have revelled in this year’s scandal-tainted race for the White House, spinning each sordid turn as proof of the perks of one-party rule.
“The ‘master of democracy’ should swallow its super confidence and arrogance,” the Communist party’s official mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, smirked in a recent editorial.
Nick Bisley, an Asia expert from La Trobe University in Melbourne, said the ignominious election battle had handed Beijing an example of the United States’ “debased political culture” and further exposed democracy as “a vulgar, deeply inefficient and chaotic form of government”.
“If you are a propaganda officer in the bureau in Beijing crafting your anti-democratic messaging you’ve got a lot to work with.”
MacFarquhar, the author of a seminal work on Mao’s tumultuous 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, said that while Beijing would now regard a Trump White House as unlikely, President Xi would have taken particular delight in watching the Republican candidate “upend” the political establishment in a way that was redolent of those 10 years of chaos.
There were parallels, he said, between Trump’s attack on the system and the way in which Chairman Mao – to a far more devastating degree – had unleashed his Red Guards on the Communist party in 1966.
“Saying that your opponent should be jailed and, if he became president, she would be jailed, that really is American-style Cultural Revolution stuff,” MacFarquhar said.
“Even if he quietly folds his tent and goes back to his reality television [after the election], he has thrown a bomb into the system and the Chinese can’t but like that.”
More than merely wallowing in the current mayhem, however, some scholars suspect there are those in Beijing actively hoping for a Trump victory on 8 November, even as the chances of that happening appear to fade.
Schell said he believed China’s “more-than-flirtations with Putin” and embrace of the Philippines’ hardman president Rodrigo Duterte showed its rulers saw the benefits of “making a deal with a good thug, rather than with somebody constrained by principle.”
“And surely in Donald Trump we have the ne plus ultra of American thuggery.”
“I think they would feel that there were all sorts of opportunities with Trump,” agreed MacFarquhar. “Some of them might be more dangerous than others. He would be an uncertain commodity, like he is for the Americans… But Hillary was a certain commodity – and not one they liked.”
MacFarquhar said part of Beijing’s attraction to Trump was simply a question of its dislike of Clinton and her support for human rights and Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia”.
“They think she is a hardliner on China, which I’m sure she is compared to Obama. So any rival to Hillary who might win would have been a blessing for them.”
But the Harvard academic said Trump’s statements questioning US support for its Nato allies and defence treaty with Japan meant he would be “an absolute gift” to Beijing as it strove for superpower status.
“Trump – even though he is ‘anti-China, anti-China, anti-China’ – has always talked about deals. That’s his shtick… [and] the Chinese would be only too happy to do a deal with Trump if that was on the cards.”
For all Trump’s affection for the word China, few experts dare predict the impact his presidency might have on ties between Washington and Beijing.
Schell said he believed Duterte, who recently travelled to China to seek an unexpected rapprochement with its leaders, could be “the most revelatory model for what we might get with Trump”.
Following the Filipino president’s lead, Trump might seek some sort of new arrangement with Xi Jinping that would be beneficial to Beijing.
If that didn’t happen, “at least they get a blank slate, at least they are dealing with someone else – and they are not bad at making deals with dictators”.
“I think Trump is our Mussolini,” Schell concluded. “And the Chinese have always gotten along fine with people like that.”
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