Editor’s note for Tuesday, November 17, 2020

My thoughts today:

The phenomenon of Chinese people who support Trump, both in the U.S. and China, is something we’ve followed at The China Project since the year he was elected:

• Why are so many first-generation Chinese immigrants supporting Donald Trump? – 2016
• The Chinese left who support Trump and the American alt-right – 2018
• Chinese Americans are increasingly siding with Trump – 2019
• The meaning of Trump’s Chinese-American support – 2020

Enter Ài Wèiwèi 艾未未, the artist and provocateur who currently lives in the U.K., who has been retweeting Trumpist conspiracy theories about the U.S. presidential election, and is endorsing misogynist insults against people who have criticised him.

Ai later said that he was just putting “the branches in the fire, seeing the flames. enjoy it burns [sic].” So perhaps he is just craving attention — in February this year, he tweeted (in Chinese): “Every single Trump fan is a rotten person.”

But if Ai does have sympathies for Trump, he joins a large group of dissidents as well as Uyghur exiles and Hong Kong activists who back Trump, often because they think he is or will be tough on the Chinese Communist Party.

We live in strange times.

Were the Obama years less strange? From a recent review of the former president’s new book, A Promised Land:

In a private meeting, Hú Jǐntāo 胡锦涛 reads from stacks of prepared papers, so monotonous that Obama considers suggesting “that we could save each other time by just exchanging papers and reading them at our leisure.”  

To get back to the present: China’s leading scholar of international relations, Yán Xuétōng 阎学通, of Tsinghua University, has a “reputation as a hardliner,” writes scholar Pär Nyrén, but he defies “popular black-and-white notions of ideological cliques in Beijing, [and] can only be understood as a liberal hawk.”

Yan is interviewed in the latest episode of a podcast by Neysun Mahboubi, a research scholar at the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania, a lecturer in law at Penn Law School, and a previous Sinica Podcast guest.  

Upcoming event: On Thursday, November 19, The China Project is hosting a free webinar with the CEO of Mitsubishi International Corporation, Jason Stevens, and the vice-chairman, Americas, of Standard Chartered, Jeremy Amias. A limited number of ACCESS members can also attend a closed-door networking session with either speaker later that day. Please email events@thechinaproject.com to receive the ACCESS promo code for the networking session and register for the free event here.

Our word of the day is a charge leveled at Australia today by wolf warrior diplomat Zhào Lìjiān 赵立坚 of China’s Foreign Ministry:  

These practices have grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs and seriously hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.

这些做法粗暴干涉中国内政，严重伤害中国人民感情。

zhèxiē zuòfǎ cūbào gānshè zhōngguó nèizhèng , yánzhòng shānghài zhōngguó rénmín gǎnqíng.

If you’re interested in the history of the Chinese people’s feelings being hurt, you can consult this 2008 map from my old website.

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief