As Donald Trump became the first former US president to be convicted of a felony on Thursday, the historic verdict sparked huge interest \u2013 and a fair amount of schadenfreude \u2013 in China. <\/p>\n
As a rising authoritarian superpower, China has long sought to project its political system as superior to American democracy. <\/p>\n
But while Trump\u2019s trial has been a boon for that narrative, it\u2019s also offered a potential window into something unimaginable and dangerous to the ruling Chinese Communist Party \u2014 an elected leader held accountable by independent courts and prosecutors, convicted by a jury of his peers. <\/p>\n
For months, Chinese propagandists have attempted to use Trump\u2019s indictments to strengthen Beijing\u2019s narrative of a United States in decline, citing the months-long legal battle as a prime example of the polarization and dysfunction of American politics. <\/p>\n
And as China woke up Friday to the news of Trump\u2019s conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, the country\u2019s heavily censored social media lit up. <\/p>\n
On Weibo, China\u2019s X-like platform, the verdict became the top trending topic, racking up more than 120 million views by the afternoon. <\/p>\n
\u201cTrump\u2019s supporters, hurry up and mobilize, storm the Capitol,\u201d said a top comment under a news brief by state news agency Xinhua. <\/p>\n
Another said: \u201cComrade Nation Builder Trump should not be fighting alone.\u201d <\/p>\n
On the Chinese internet, the former US president earned the nickname of Chuan Jianguo<\/em>, or \u201cTrump, the (Chinese) nation builder\u201d during his time in office \u2013 a quip to suggest his isolationist foreign policy and divisive domestic agenda were actually helping Beijing to overtake Washington on the global stage. <\/p>\n Some nationalist influencers gleefully mocked the verdict. \u201cIt seems that in 2024, a civil war in America is not just a dream!\u201d said one such blogger with 4 million followers. <\/p>\n Under leader Xi Jinping, China\u2019s most assertive leader in decades, the country\u2019s social media platforms have become increasingly dominated by anti-American, nationalistic voices. <\/p>\n \u201cAlthough he is guilty, he can still run for president. A \u2018criminal\u2019 can become president \u2013 this is the ridiculous aspect of Western-style democracy,\u201d said another. <\/p>\n Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of state-run nationalist tabloid Global Times, also weighed in. <\/p>\n \u201cNaturally, Chinese people are watching the spectacle with amusement,\u201d he said on Weibo. \u201cHere\u2019s what everyone is most concerned about: First, will Trump actually go to jail? Second, can he still run for president?\u201d <\/p>\n But analysts say Trump\u2019s conviction could be a tricky topic for Chinese state propagandists to navigate. <\/p>\n \u201cOn the one hand, it highlights a rotting and fracturing American democracy. On the other hand, it highlights that a former top leader can be arrested, put on trial, judged by jury of peers and convicted, for relatively small acts of corruption,\u201d wrote Bill Bishop, a China watcher and author of the Sinocism newsletter. <\/p>\n China\u2019s judicial system remains tightly beholden to the ruling Communist Party, according to legal observers, and has a conviction rate of around 99%. <\/p>\n The timing of the conviction also added to the sensitivity, coming just days before the 35th anniversary of Beijing\u2019s bloody crackdown of the pro-democracy Tiananmen movement in 1989, according to Bishop. <\/p>\n So far, Chinese state media outlets have yet to publish the kind of blistering commentaries that previously appeared alongside news coverage of Trump\u2019s legal entanglements. <\/p>\n Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, said China\u2019s state media is unlikely to play up the coverage in the days ahead. <\/p>\n \u201cThey don\u2019t want to attack Donald Trump because if he becomes the president, they know the consequences. Instead, they\u2019re likely to use it to showcase the problems of the US system,\u201d said Wu, a former reporter in China. <\/p>\n \u201cThey need to be really careful about that.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As Donald Trump became the first former US president to be convicted of a felony on Thursday, the historic verdict sparked huge interest \u2013 and a fair amount of schadenfreude \u2013 in China. As a rising authoritarian superpower, China has long sought to project its political system as superior to American democracy. But while Trump\u2019s trial has been <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3959,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3958","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}