(Bloomberg) — US Vice President Kamala Harris has become a trending topic on Chinese social media, with users betting that her candidacy for the Democratic presidential ticket would return Donald Trump to the White House.
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The American election dominated the top four positions on China’s X-like platform Weibo on Monday morning, as China woke up to President Joe Biden’s exit from the 2024 race. The hashtag “Biden’s Exit” was viewed 370 times. million times by noon, while the topic “Harris praising Biden” got about 57 million hits.
“Does this mean Trump is ready to win?” asked one user, as Chinese citizens tried to parse what the change meant for the world’s second-largest economy. “The Democratic Party has become the first to prepare for the 2028 US elections. The future is promising,” joked another Weibo user.
Although Harris briefly met with President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Thailand in 2022, she has not visited China as vice president, meaning Chinese citizens are less familiar with her. That contrasts with California Governor Gavin Newsom, who last year brought a more peaceful message to Beijing in a trip that drew applause in the Asian country.
An online poll of 12,000 Weibo users on Monday found that nearly 80% now believed Trump would beat Harris in the November race, according to results published by the Shanghai-based Morning Post at noon around five hours after the question was first asked.
A social media account affiliated with CCTV covertly attacked the US in a WeChat article on Sunday. Praising China’s steady pace in promoting reforms, the article said that “crisis has erupted in some countries,” adding that the world had even seen “the extreme situation of political figures attacked by an assassin.”
Images of a bloodied Trump defiantly shaking his fist seconds after being shot swept Chinese social media earlier this month. This brush with death appears to have bolstered the popularity of the former president – who started a trade war with Beijing when he was last in the White House – with citizens praising his political instincts.
“Trump is ready to win!” wrote one Weibo user in a post that was liked 14,000 times and called the now-iconic photograph “perfect.”
State media outlets, including the Guangzhou Daily, have highlighted that Harris would be the first American president of Asian descent if she wins the hotly contested November race. But few reports have mentioned the political implications of his possible administration for China.
“Their policy toward China during the elections will likely depart from the Democrats’ usual ideologies,” said Tang Xiaoyang, chairman of the international relations department at Tsinghua University. “But in the short term it probably won’t develop a very targeted China strategy.”
(Updates to include CCTV-affiliated social media report. A previous version of this story corrected Gavin Newsom’s name.)
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