(Bloomberg) -- After months of relative silence, Chinese state media is starting to unspool its narrative on the US presidential election, casting the vote as a “money burning” display of “unprecedented chaos.”
A small but steady trickle of news items in recent days disparaged the soon-to-be underway ballot as already descending into anarchy — and a harbinger of more disruptions. State broadcaster China Central Television, for one, focused on this season’s pre-election drama rather than the policy differences between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
“What’s the difference who becomes president?” it asked in a breathless, almost five-minute segment on Monday, which highlighted President Joe Biden’s abrupt last-minute exit from the race, as well as repeated assassination attempts on the Republican candidate’s life.
China, a one-party state now under the indefinite rule of Xi Jinping, has long been critical of the US system, with state media once calling American democracy the “rule of the few over the many.” But this time around, an even harder line is emerging than in previous years.
“The US election, which has entered the sprint stage, has seen unprecedented chaos,” CCTV’s reporter said in a voiceover. “How much chaos awaits during vote counting and power transitioning?”
The report, which was among several of CCTV broadcasts that briefly trended on Chinese social media platforms including Weibo, accused both candidates of fanning the flames of populism and racial strife, and promoting extreme views.
Admiration of America among Chinese people has been steadily eroding in recent years, expedited by a chain of anti-China policies and regulations introduced by Washington during the Trump administration — an approach that would likely continue under Harris.
Still, for months, Chinese officials and academics have been reticent on commenting publicly on the US vote, exercising caution on taking any stance on who might win to avoid being seen as influencing the results. That’s ensured discussions of post-election scenarios and what they might mean for China have remained fairly vanilla.
Different Tack
Now, state and social media are scrutinizing the US system in part by homing in on the influence of big money on politics. An earlier CCTV report said the US ballots had become a battle between billionaires, casting the latest election as the most “money-burning” event in the country’s history.
Citing reports by media outlets including the Financial Times and the New York Times, the report showcased the role of business tycoons Elon Musk and Bill Gates as key donors to political parties, concluding that such practices have led to common people’s interests “being marginalized and even sacrificed.”
The China Daily newspaper’s former deputy editor, Kang Bing, lamented in a commentary over the lack of improvement in people’s livelihoods in the US, whose name in Chinese translates to “beautiful country.”
“Americans are becoming less and less confident,” he wrote. “Why else are the presidential candidates cursing each other in public using expletives?”
A cartoon in the same publication late last month showed an elephant and a donkey — animals traditionally used to depict the Republican and Democratic parties — engaged in a tussle over who gets “ownership” of the White House, under the headline: Polarizating US Elections Breaking Apart the US.
Zhu Junwei, a former researcher for the People’s Liberation Army who’s now director of American research at Beijing think tank Grandview Institution, said few Chinese academics took such portrayals seriously.
“Scholars are trying to look deeper into American politics, society and its people,” she said “to understand what this election — and all the phenomena we’ve seen during this and recent election cycles — mean for the US, China and the world.”
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