China watches Trump courtroom drama: A ‘premium show without paywall’
The unprecedented scenes of former president Donald Trump’s arraignment in New York and his furious response afterward fascinated the Chinese internet Wednesday, with some seizing the chance to slam U.S. democracy and many more simply binge-watching a “premium show without paywall.”
Chinese state media — which generally likes to play up problems in the United States, from school shootings through Black Lives Matter protests to political mayhem that makes democracy look messy — also prominently featured news of the extraordinary 34 felony charges against Trump, who spearheaded a trade war with China during his four years in office.
That theme continued Wednesday.
Trump’s arraignment “epitomizes social divide, systemic alienation, and political and cultural decay” in the United States, which is turning into a “Divided Nations of America,” wrote a reporter for the state-run Xinhua News Agency.
CCTV, China’s main broadcaster, relayed the latest in its hourly news updates, and all major Chinese outlets sent out alerts on developments. Some Chinese journalists joined the media horde outside the Manhattan courthouse, live-streaming for several hours and speaking to Trump supporters.
Trump’s remark during his defiant Mar-a-Lago news conference that the United States was “going to hell” trended on Weibo, the microblogging site that is equivalent to Twitter, and sparked suggestions that the United States was on the brink of another civil war.
The unexpected plot twist of the Trump indictment brought rare entertainment to the tightly controlled Chinese cyberspace, analysts noted, with the internet feeling increasingly like an echo chamber dominated by state propaganda and nationalist influencers.
Trump-related discussions dominated social media chat this week, with a vaguely worded hashtag about “Trump’s 136-year prison term” getting nearly 400 million views on Weibo as of Wednesday afternoon. This was based on the incorrect assumption that Trump had been convicted and faced a sentence of 136 years in jail.
“I bet he will run for presidency again when freed at age 231,” one Weibo user quipped, oblivious to the fact that even if Trump is convicted at a trial, a prison sentence would be far less than that.
Some commentators hope the U.S. political divide that allegedly “motivated” Trump’s arraignment could give China a little breathing room amid the growing rivalry between the two countries. Others parroted the Republican narrative of Trump being a victim to political persecution.
“Trump must continue with his election campaign to avoid being politically annihilated and imprisonment,” nationalist commentator Ming Jinwei, formerly a senior editor at Xinhua, wrote in his popular WeChat blog.
Liu Haiming, a professor of journalism at Chongqing University who studies online opinion, said the commentary was a reflection of the inability to talk about Chinese politics on the censored internet and an enduring fascination with the unorthodox 45th president.
“This is all a show to Chinese social media users, and people are talking about Trump in ways they can’t talk about Chinese leaders; it’s liberating in a way,” Liu said in a phone interview. The “unserious tone [when talking about Trump] may help the comments survive longer because, to censors, they look like a movie review instead of comments on politics.”
Trump also has a cult following in China, where some people see him as a rebel who challenges the establishment, Liu said. “It may be one-dimensional and mixed with a lot of funny assumptions, including that Trump’s trade war actually pushed China to increase self-reliance on high tech and prepared China for more turbulent times ahead.”
Trump’s popularity — or notoriety — is shown by his many nicknames in China, especially Jianguo (a dated yet still common Chinese name that literally means “build the country”), referring to a sentiment prevalent on social media that Trump’s misrule of the United States was making China great again.