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Kevin Frayer via Getty Images
They did not go lightly to China. Furthermore, the pebbles stuck in the shoes of Beijing politicians had long assumed the size of a rock. Therefore, it was not too surprising that even the rigid People’s Daily, the voice of the powerful CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, reacted to Trump’s defeat on its official Twitter profile, with a retweet from The Donald, in which it stated triumphantly “I won, and also by a lot” – combining it with an emoticon with a face that laughs out loud and a succinct comment, which could not be more explicit: “haha!”.
In short, the sigh of relief that Beijing is giving at the moment at the defeat of Trump and the victory of Biden seems much more than a sigh: it seems quite real, pleased, treacherous.
Perhaps in those places many still remember when, in 2011, Joe Biden, the decidedly less elderly then vice president of Obama, surprised everyone by participating in a basketball game at a high school in the south-central province of Sichuan, along with President. Chinese Xi Jinping.
But in the secret rooms of the Forbidden City in Beijing, where the levers of the vast country that has now become a world economic leader are maneuvered, Xi and his team know well that a little perfidy against the hated adversary “is fine” in the immediate future. but they also know equally that celebrating, perhaps hoping to move from the “ping pong diplomacy” of the 1970s – from Nixonian memory – to that of basketball, would be really premature to expect it. Because they have long understood very well that the United States, with Biden, will not necessarily go soft on China.
Some commentators have suggested that the Trump presidency – and now its unworthy end – has pushed Chinese leaders increasingly confident in the superiority of their own system of government; that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” that has shown that it can work – albeit in a strictly controlled and autocratically governed country like China – much better than the “old” western democracies. That is why the editor of the Global Times, a Chinese government newspaper (but what newspaper in China is not?), Hu Xijin, on Election Day, had cheerfully commented, also on Twitter, under a photograph of the blinds descents in the cities. from the United States, that “electoral unrest is a complication of elections in democratic countries” and that “the United States is in decline.” Obviously, no one pointed out to him that instead the Chinese Communist Party keeps the shutters tightly closed from the inside, metaphorically speaking, to prevent citizens from seeing how leaders are selected by its authoritarian regime.
Reading comments on social media and editorials in Chinese and Hong Kong newspapers in recent days, it becomes clear that in China it is hoped that a White House inhabited by Biden can at least prove to be a more reliable and consistent interlocutor than the one in which the tenant was Trump who, if with one hand he unleashed trade battles (but not real wars …) against Beijing, with the other he widely praised his colleague Xi Jinping, turning a blind eye to the multiple violations of human rights in China and even the concentration camps in Xinjiang. Furthermore, since his election, Donald had made it very clear that human rights would not be one of the main concerns of his presidency …
According to the latest Pew Research Center polls, now only 22% of interviewed Americans have a positive opinion of the Dragon – a drop of 21 percentage points over the past twenty years. And not just because of the various rounds of the trade confrontation between Washington and Beijing, from increasingly fierce technological competition, and accusations of negligence in handling the Sars-Cov-2 epidemic, but also and above all because of a foreign policy that John R. Bolton, national security adviser to the presidency of Trump between 2018 and 2019, in his essay “The room where it all happened” defined “Random and rooted in self-interest.” Now Biden knows well that in Beijing he will find a ruling class and also a public opinion hardened by Trump’s aggressive and fluctuating behavior and that it will not be easy to reestablish a dialogue.
The Chinese leadership also knows that a more linear interlocutor, such as Biden is expected to be, does not necessarily mean a weak interlocutor. And indeed, Biden has never completely escaped Trump’s fundamental refrain about “Chinese danger.” On the contrary, the new president of the United States has repeatedly reiterated the need to “be intransigent and tough” with a China that, through practices considered unfair, has acquired advantages considered unfair, especially in the high-tech sector and, more in property intellectual in general. As Biden himself wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine last spring, “China is in no position to allow itself to ignore more than half of the global economy,” if the rest of the world can act and react in a united way.
Meanwhile the Chinese are watching and patiently waiting, as is their custom, to see what the “enemy” will do, to adjust their action-reaction accordingly. Sparing no jokes and scathing comments, as we’ve seen.
But basically how to blame them. Taking a last walk on Wechat or Weibo, we understand that very few Chinese see in the American chaos of the last days – in fact, in the last four years – a demonstration that the elections are probably much better. don’t make them yours.
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