More than two millennia ago, Chinese leaders discovered that, if barbarians want to engage in mutually destructive fights among themselves, the thing for China to do is to hold their beer and let them have at it.
Today, they are delighted to see us destroy ourselves.
Ishaan Tharoor of the Post writes, a propos “China’s evolving view of President Donald Trump’s second term,”
Beijing sees Trump’s disruptive actions — his gutting of institutions of U.S. soft power, his launching of trade wars against adversaries and allies alike, his steady eroding of trust in the U.S. alliance system — as acts of self-sabotage that need no Chinese prompting. Better for now, as Gen Z would say, to let him cook.
After Trump moved to dismember the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which backed internationally oriented outlets such as Voice of America, Chinese state-made broadcasts took the place of U.S. programming on TV networks in countries as disparate as Indonesia and Nigeria. Trump, like a growing number of Republicans, viewed the media properties as suspicious fonts of “anti-American” liberalism. But Chinese propagandists exulted at the demise of these U.S.-funded news operations, which had, to varying extents, chronicled the state of pro-democracy movements around the world and provided space for dissident voices in countries where political freedoms are curtailed.
“The Chinese people are happy to see the U.S. anti-China ideological fortress breached from within,” cheered Hu Xijin, former chief editor of the Global Times, a Chinese state-run, English-language newspaper, this year on social media.
In a video circulating this month, Victor Gao, a former Chinese diplomat and vice president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, mused whether Trump may come to be remembered as an American Mikhail Gorbachev. The comparison to the late Soviet leader and famous author of glasnost and perestroika was not meant to be flattering: Gorbachev’s attempt at reforms, Gao said, precipitated the collapse of the Soviet empire and unleashed a “trauma” still being felt today.
Gao suggested that by the end of the decade, Trump’s own attempt at reforms will have “fundamentally changed” both the United States and NATO, likely for the worse. Trump would not have made America “bigger, stronger, greater,” Gao said, but rather may have “led it astray, like Gorbachev.”
The fall of the Soviet Union isn’t the only historical parallel alive in Chinese discourse about the U.S. A host of Chinese commentators see in MAGA a whiff of China’s own Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong, which saw myriad purges and the defenestration of ranks of the intellectual classes and political elites. “Mao unleashed the Red Guards to ‘smash’ the police, prosecutors, and courts, so that loyal revolutionaries could seize control of state machinery,” Zhang Qianfan, a constitutional law professor in Beijing, recently told CNN. “Trump brought Elon Musk and six young Silicon Valley executives into the White House under the banner of eliminating corruption, waste, and inefficiency — akin to the ‘Cultural Revolution Leadership Group’ entering the party’s central leadership.” …
Various “initiatives” promulgated by Xion development, security and cultural harmony have put forward a rosy Chinese vision of global cooperation and prosperity stripped of liberal ideals around universal rights and democracy. China’s position is gaining ground thanks to the shifts in Washington. “Beijing’s assessment right now is that the United States is dismantling, fairly systematically, the sources of its strength,” Julian Gewirtz, a China scholar and former Biden administration official, said in a recent interview.
“The United States, in their view, is dismantling its alliance relationships and alienating much of the world,” Gewirtz told the Wire China. “It is dismantling aspects of the U.S. science and technology ecosystem, cutting funding to some of our great universities, and making it very unappealing, if not outright impossible, for foreign talent to come do research in those universities. And it is eliminating arms of U.S. influence around the world, from USAID to Voice of America. China’s view is that the United States is, in a sense, unilaterally disarming.”
Facing MAGA 