“Trump and Kamala Harris are two bowls of poison for Beijing,” said Zhao Minghao of Shanghai’s Fudan University, to the Financial Times. “Both see China as a competitor or even an adversary.”

The poison analogy has, unfortunately, caught on in elite Chinese circles.

Renmin University’s Shi Yinhong, one of China’s most widely quoted academics, said China’s hope was that the “lesser of the two evils” would be elected. To the dismay of Chinese leaders who already had to deal with Trump for four years, they have not gotten the preferred outcome and are not looking forward to another term.

During the campaign, Americans perceived Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump’s China policies as widely divergent. Chinese observers, on the other hand, viewed them as largely the same.

To China’s Communist Party and its tightly controlled academic community, America has taken on a menacing view. As a result, the gap in perceptions between Americans and Chinese is wide. In the last half-decade, it has appeared to have widened even more so.

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Officially, Beijing wants to get along with America. President Xi Jinping, in a congratulatory message to Trump, talked about finding “the right way for China and the United States to get along with each era in the new era.”

Xi’s foreign ministry said China has maintained an unchanging stance toward the U.S.

“China’s policy on the U.S. is consistent,” Mao Ning, foreign ministry spokesperson, said after the election. “We will continue to view and handle our bilateral relations under the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation.”

Other official comments have not been so benign. In May 2019, People’s Daily, the party’s self-described “mouthpiece” and most authoritative publication in China, carried a landmark editorial declaring a “people’s war” on America.

Americans may think they can ignore hostile propaganda, but this phrase has had special meaning for the Communist Party.

“A people’s war is a total war, and its strategy and tactics require the overall mobilization of political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, military and other power resources, the integrated use of multiple forms of struggle and combat methods,” declared a column carried in March 2023 by PLA Daily, an official news website of the People’s Liberation Army. The army reports to the Party.

Why does China’s ruling organization display such hostility? The Communist Party of China views the U.S. as an existential threat not because of anything Americans have ever said or done but because of who they are and what they stand for.

An insecure ruling organization in Beijing is afraid of the inspirational impact on the Chinese people of America’s ideals and form of governance. This means even in the best of times, America’s mere existence is considered a direct threat to communist rule.

The perceived threat to the party was heightened when Trump was in the Oval Office. In his first term, he was widely popular among ordinary Chinese in China. There are many explanations for this phenomenon, but the most fundamental, I think, is that he was then — as he is now — abhorred by the privileged.

The Chinese people, therefore, identify with Trump, who led a revolt against America’s coastal business, cultural and academic classes.

“I deeply resent the hypocritical smug elites and heartily welcome the return of Trump’s salt-of-the-earth approach,” said Charles Burton of the Sinopsis think tank to me last week. “I think the Chinese people see it the same way as tens of millions of Americans who cast their ballots for the billionaire outsider.”

“Trump gives the Chinese people the inspiration that they too can sweep away their elites,” Burton added.

Moreover, Trump provided ordinary Chinese with a contrast with their leaders. Xi Jinping almost never appears in public except on formal occasions. On the extremely rare occasions when he goes out among the people — as he did in December 2013 when visiting a Beijing steamed bun shop, for instance — the event is staged by propaganda officials.

Xi is always scripted and humorless, speaking in a stilted Communist Party lingo heavily laced with ideological phrasing. His predecessor, Hu Jintao, was even less lifelike. Trump, of course, is the opposite, unfiltered and always ready to break convention. He is the breath (gale-force wind?) of fresh air.

Di Dongsheng of Beijing’s Renmin University, in a widely publicized November 2020 live-streamed event in China, spoke about how Chinese leaders had in the past used Wall Street — “the core power of the United States” as he put it — and “old friends” to tell American presidents what to do. Di also said that these links to the White House had been broken during the Trump years. Trump, in short, was not inclined to take advice from East Coast elitists.

So it’s no mystery why Chinese leaders think Trump is poisonous. They fear they can’t talk to him through their upper-class friends in America — and they want him nowhere near the lower rungs of China.

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