In February, 1957, eight years after the founding of Communist China and nine years prior to the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong made a speech at the eleventh meeting of the Supreme State Conference, entitled “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” that defined his political philosophy. In the speech—arguably his best known—the Great Helmsman drew a distinction between “the people” and “the enemy.” The people were effectively the in-group, while the enemy was nothing but a collection of demons and thugs to be vigilantly resisted. The us-versus-them dichotomy, a cornerstone of Maoism later enshrined in his Little Red Book, effectively painted the world in black and white, banishing diversity, difference, or considerations of civil liberty. Yet that worldview has found curious potency sixty-odd years later in the mouth of another bombastic demagogue, reared in a wholly different political system, who shares Mao’s knack for polemical excess and xenophobic paranoia. America may still be reeling from Trump’s victory as the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, but many Chinese, watching from the other side of the world, view his ascent as natural: the rise of another strongman whose politics of exclusion and rhetoric of hate both reprise and reflect China’s past and present anxieties.
In the United States, Trumpism seems like a chilling wake-up call for members of both parties forced for the first time to confront the deformed dynamics of their sociopolitical system. But in China the appeal of ChuanPu, the Chinese rendering of Trump’s name, is readily apparent. From the start, Trump’s campaign relied on a core constituency of beleaguered blue-collar voters—“the people,” Mao would have surely termed them—whose economic distress he masterfully channelled toward the creation of loathsome villains, the enemy. The ease with which Trump erected and proselytized this divide speaks to what the Chairman would have labelled a ripeness for “class struggle.” As Eric X. Li writes in a thoughtful essay in Foreign Affairs, the comparison is unsurprising given China’s Marxist heritage. In Li’s words, “As the Chinese suffered tremendously from extreme class struggles in their recent history, Western democracy seemed to have reached an enviable position by erasing class lines. But the Trump campaign is showing the world that this may be an illusion. America’s working class is angry.”
On the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, a few days from now, the current generation of the governing political élite, none of whom were immune to the savagery of the sixties, is more alert than ever to the threat of proletariat resentment. It is little wonder that President Xi Jinping, whose father was brutally tortured during the Revolution and whose half-sister committed suicide out of sheer despair, has tried to make an anti-graft drive the defining pillar of his Presidency. It is the most visible and systemic crusade a sitting Chinese leader has launched against the ruling class, and plays to the popular sense that corruption has gotten out of hand—in American terms, that the system is rigged. “In China, there is sympathy for the Trump phenomenon because the Chinese are familiar with the feeling of resentment against establishment,” Daniel Bell, a political philosophy professor at Tsinghua University and the author of “The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy,” told me. “For all the curtailing civil and political liberties that Xi is doing, he is also successfully fighting political élites engaged in corruption. This is the main reason why Xi is popular in China, especially among ordinary people.”
In many respects, ordinary people in China, or the “old hundred names,” as they are called—a colloquial catchall for those commoners who didn’t make it into the history books—are not unlike the largest segment of Trump supporters: of limited education, dispossessed, and frequently overlooked because of their distance from power. Abstract principles, which Hillary Clinton has been known to proclaim in China—of human rights and women’s rights—seem less relevant than the practical economic challenges facing the average citizen. “Trump is an exceedingly smart man who has had remarkable success in making hotels and towers and TV shows,” a Chinese blogger posted on a Web forum devoted to American politics. When someone else asked about Trump’s trade policies, many of which are hostile to China, the same blogger responded dismissively that Trump is “a businessman first and foremost” and “will do what is in both countries’ economic interest”—giving voice to the sentiment, perennially popular in China, that pragmatism inevitably reigns in the end.
And then there’s the matter of Trump’s race-baiting, scapegoating, and bigotry against Mexicans, Muslims, and the general immigrant population. “Average Chinese people have less of a problem with that,” Kecheng Fang, a former reporter in China who currently researches Chinese politics and media at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. As irritated as certain Americans may be by what they consider excessive tolerance for foreigners and minorities, many in China are even less sympathetic to the plight of minorities. “The truth is that most Chinese don’t have enough knowledge of other races,” Fang said. “They don’t know what it’s like to be a minority. It was never part of their education, so they are unaware of the privileges they enjoy.” Ninety-two per cent of the Chinese population belong to the ethnic Han majority, and aside from the occasional propagandistic variety show in which ethnic-minority members are paraded on stage in colorful costumes, their smiling countenances signalling solidarity with the government, they have historically been subjected to discrimination and are considered cultural outsiders.
In addition, state-run Web sites, newspapers, and television news programs—the go-to information source for most Chinese—only narrate the government’s message, which is that, despite the state’s generosity to ethnic minorities like Tibetans and Uighurs, those same minorities incite unrest and inflict mass attacks against innocent people. “They broadcast the terrorist attacks by the Uighurs, like the one in Kunming,” Fang said. In that incident, twenty-nine civilians were stabbed to death in a train station by eight Uighur Muslims. “They also broadcast state policies that allow minority students to attend competitive colleges with a lower exam score, the Chinese equivalent of affirmation action,” he continued. “So people are mad. They think, Minorities take away college spots but still they remain ingrates. Of course they should be punished.” In the words of one pro-Trump Chinese commentator, “Trump lays out the facts. He’s the only one with guts.” Trump logic, as twisted as it is effective, may also explain why fifty-four per cent of respondents in a poll conducted by Global Times, a state-sponsored Chinese paper, supported Trump, versus only forty per cent of Americans who do.
As the November election approaches in the United States, after what is sure to be one of America’s most memorable campaigns, these numbers may fluctuate on both sides of the world. As far away as the electoral college and state caucuses might seem to the average Chinese citizen, America’s embrace of an abrasive showman who threatens to fracture a major party is a reminder that the infirmities of a Western democracy may not be entirely different from those of a Chinese socialist plutocracy. As some asked online, in a Web forum dedicated to Trump, what are the chances that America’s sociopolitical power structure may pick the same kind of leader as the National People’s Congress did in China? “It’s too bad I won’t be getting my US citizenship until December 1st,” a forum participant and soon-to-be immigrant lamented. “America is in real danger and he’s the only one who’ll do something about it. Trump would certainly have my vote.”
