Trump
has no idea how to run a superpower, say Chinese media
Communist
party-controlled Global Times says Trump ‘is not behaving as a
president who will become master of the White House’
Tom Phillips in
Beijing
Monday 19 December
2016 07.26 GMT
Donald Trump appears
to have not a clue how to lead a superpower.
That was the
conclusion of China’s Global Times newspaper on Monday morning as
the country’s media weighed in on the president-elect’s latest
social media assaults on Beijing.
“Trump is not
behaving as a president who will become master of the White House in
a month,” the Communist party controlled newspaper wrote in an
editorial. “He bears no sense of how to lead a superpower.”
The article came
after the US president-elect again used Twitter, which has been
blocked in China since 2009, to berate the leaders of the world’s
second largest economy.
“China steals
United States Navy research drone in international waters – rips it
out of water and takes it to China in unpresidented [sic] act,”
Trump tweeted early on Saturday morning after it emerged the Chinese
navy had seized a US naval drone that had been operating in the South
China Sea.
In a second tweet,
Trump wrote:
Follow
Donald J. Trump ✔
@realDonaldTrump
We should tell China
that we don't want the drone they stole back.- let them keep it!
1:59 AM - 18 Dec
2016
15,571 15,571
Retweets 52,822 52,822 likes
Those 221 characters
threatened to further alienate China’s rulers, already reeling from
Trump’s recent decision to hold a 10-minute phone call with the
Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, and threat to upend long-standing
US policy on Taiwan.
On Friday, President
Obama cautioned Trump against allowing relations with China slip into
“full conflict mode”.
In its editorial,
the fervently nationalist Global Times, a state-run tabloid that
sometimes reflects official thinking, indicated such a deterioration
was certainly on the cards if Trump continued to act up.
People in China were
unsure whether the billionaire’s attacks on Beijing were part of
attempts to wage a psychological war or simply an example of his
amateurishness.
“But if he treats
China after assuming office in the same way as in his tweets, China
will not exercise restraint,” the newspaper warned. “The Chinese
government should be fully prepared for a hardline Trump.”
In an online video
that has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, the newspaper’s
controversial editor, Hu Xijin, said: “I don’t know if he is
playing the psychological card with China or is in fact just
unprofessional … China should teach him some lessons so he might
learn to respect China after he is sworn in.”
A comment piece on
the front page of the overseas edition of the Communist party’s
official mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, also suggested Beijing
would not be cowed by Trump’s provocations.
“It is difficult
to understand his true psychology,” wrote Hua Yiwen, whom the paper
described as an international affairs expert. “But China shouldn’t
spend much effort trying to guess what he is thinking. We should
simply stand firm, take control of the situation and handle it
calmly.”
Bill Bishop, a
Washington DC-based China expert, said he sensed “abject despair”
in the US capital at how Trump was conducting US-China relations
through misspelled tweets.
“This is
unpresidented behaviour by a precedent-elect,” joked Bishop. “It
would be funny if the stakes weren’t so high.”
“This is not a
business deal. This is a political relationship between nuclear
powers who are already on the path towards conflict in several
dimensions,” added Bishop, who publishes the influential Sinocism
newsletter.
“This kind of
uncertainty, this kind of petulance, this kind of random tweeting …
is not a grand strategy that is going to push the Chinese on to their
heels so they are going to make concessions. This is juvenile,
immature, inexperienced behaviour that has the potential to lead to
many problems in the US-China relationship, some of which could have
some pretty serious and damaging ramifications.”
Bishop questioned
the Chinese media’s suggestion that Trump’s tweets were part of a
wily psychological ploy to force trade concessions from Beijing. “I
wouldn’t ascribe brilliant psychological warfare skills to Donald
Trump,” he said.
Was it possible
Trump’s tweets were part of an ingenious new master plan for
Sino-US relations that would emerge after his inauguration on 20
January? Bishop was skeptical.
“I think that is
about as likely as Xi Jinping waking up on 1 December, 2017 and
declaring China a democracy.”
Additional reporting
by Christy Yao
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