China
China
tantalized by US election mayhem and prospect of 'thug' Trump as
president
Experts
say that Beijing would prefer Republican over Hillary Clinton who is
considered a hardliner on human rights
Tom Phillips in
Beijing
Monday 7 November
2016 07.15 GMT
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.”
What a Donald Trump
campaign rally reveals about America
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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