Why Chinese Liberals Worship Trump
Trump-mania is all the rage these days among Chinese liberal intellectuals. The important question is — why?
Trump-mania is all the rage these days among Chinese liberal intellectuals. They gossip about him at dinner tables, read his tweets at @Trump_Chinese (which has almost 250 thousand followers), some even go as far as proclaiming him as the “savior of China,” a perplexing statement given Trump’s vitriolic anti-China stance.
This puzzling phenomenon can best be explained by beaconism, a concept formulated by Lin Yao, a Yale University scholar. The explanation is simple at its core — Trump, in the minds of Chinese intellectuals, represents the polar opposite to China’s party-state system of economics and governance, a system which they vehemently reject.
To fully understand their position, however flawed it may be, we need to start from the base pillars of Chinese liberalism and dissect its cultural context in relation to the Chinese intellectual fabric.
What is Chinese Liberalism?
China began its stratospheric rise in the late 1970s with the “reform and opening-up” program. With it came the importation of western ideologies, at the time dominated by the twin towers of 80’s conservatism — Reagan and Thatcher. Their neoliberalist (economically speaking) policies of deregulation, tax breaks, and reduction of state services left a deep impression in the nascent Chinese intellectual fabric that forms the basis of Chinese liberalism today.
To the Chinese liberals, economic freedom is the principal driver behind political freedom. In the words of liberal scholar Frederick Hayek, they believe that “Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends.” To this end, they have adopted the classic liberal stance of economic development begets political liberalization. To liberalize China, one must eliminate the state-interventionist system of Chinese economics and fully embrace the free market.
To older Chinese liberals, the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward are still fresh in their minds. The appropriation of socialist vocabulary by the Chinese Communist Party, and the over-emphasis on class-struggles in government propaganda, further denounces socialism or any form of leftism as a viable ideological path for human governance. Although it is clear, from an informed socialist perspective, that China is state-capitalist in its nature, Chinese liberals still view China as the ultimate incarnation of evil born out of socialism.
Thus the intellectual fabric of Chinese liberalism is pushed further to the right due to their justified hatred of the Chinese state-party system, which they perceive as “socialist.” Combined with a love for free market economics, deregulation, and limited government intervention, it is no surprise that they are so receptive to American hyper-conservatism and Trump by extension.
Beaconism as a Self-Perpetuating Myth
The rejection of China’s “socialist” mythos leaves an ideological vacuum. As the so-called “leader of the free world,” America snugly fills this vacuum as a beacon of institutional righteousness.
To accept the American model as a beacon model, one must also embrace the mythos of American exceptionalism, believing that America is the “first new nation” championing liberty, equality before the law, individual responsibility, republicanism, representative democracy, and laissez-faire economics. In the minds of Chinese liberals, China’s woefully inadequate legal system, where the rule of law is entirely absent, stands in sharp contrast to America’s moral institutions that rules its people justly through a codified system of laws.
America, of course, is not the land of milk and honey as so ideally portrayed within the framework of American exceptionalism. However, for Chinese intellectuals, a purely de jure interpretation of America is enough to justify their rosy adoration of Americana, while conveniently ignoring the de facto institutionalized inequalities inherent in the American system.
Institutional/political beaconism is only part of the story, however. Civilizational beaconism is the far more toxic twin to political beaconism. Born out of China’s humiliating past under western imperialism, Chinese intellectuals viewed the West’s technical prowess as a natural result of the “superiority” of western civilization, and by extension, white civilization. To accept the lineage of western values, idealized as an unbroken chain of evolution from Athens to America, one must reject China’s Confucianist past and strive to become “whiter” ideologically.
However, to embrace western/white civilization as a beacon, one must also accept certain tenets of white supremacy. The idea of Muslims, Latinos, and Blacks as “lesser” is further confirmed by China’s inherent racist past, as the Celestial Kingdom surrounded by lesser tributary states. This ideological acceptance is then exacerbated by government-sponsored propaganda portraying Muslims as an unruly and violent people to justify racially fueled oppression in Xinjiang.
Thus, it is not hard to see why Chinese liberals are so receptive to Donald Trump. As the principal advocate for American exceptionalism, Trump’s racist policies and his embrace of liberal ideals of market economy perfectly justify the twisted worldviews of Chinese liberals. His vitriolic hatred of the left is viewed as justified opposition to socialism, as characterized by China’s party-state system. Ludicrous as it may sound, to Chinese liberals, Trump is a beacon of American superiority, who will surely squash the Chinese Communist Party and usher in a new era of liberal prosperity.
