Justin Lane/Pool/Reuters
Former US President Donald Trump leaves the courtroom after a jury found him guilty of all 34 felony counts in his criminal trial in New York on May 30, 2024.
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After Donald Trump became the first former US president to be convicted of a felony on Thursday, the historic verdict sparked huge interest and considerable glee in China.
As a rising authoritarian superpower, China has long sought to present its political system as superior to American democracy.
But while Trump’s trial has favored that view, it has also offered a glimpse into a danger unimaginable for China’s Communist establishment: elected leaders being held accountable by independent courts and prosecutors, and convicted by juries of their peers.
Chinese propagandists have for months sought to use Trump’s indictment to bolster Beijing’s case that the United States is in decline, portraying the months-long legal battle as a prime example of polarization and dysfunction in American politics.
And as China woke up on Friday to the news that President Trump had been convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, the country’s heavily censored social media roared to life.
On China’s X-like platform Weibo, the ruling became a top trending topic, garnering more than 120 million views by afternoon.
“Trump supporters, hurry up and mobilize and storm the Capitol,” said a top commentary in the news bulletin from state news agency Xinhua.
Another said: “Comrade Nation Builder Trump should not fight alone.”
On the Chinese Internet, the former U.S. president River Foundingor during his time in office, he was called “(China’s) nation-builder Trump” — a tongue-in-cheek remark suggesting that his isolationist foreign policy and divisive domestic policies are actually helping Beijing overtake Washington on the global stage.
Some nationalistic influencers gleefully mocked the ruling: “It looks like a civil war in America might not be a dream come true in 2024!” said one blogger with 4 million followers.
Under President Xi Jinping, China’s most assertive leader in decades, the country’s social media platforms have become increasingly dominated by anti-American, nationalist voices.
“He’s guilty but he can run for president. A ‘criminal’ can become president. This is the ridiculous side of Western-style democracy,” another said.
Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of the state-run nationalist tabloid Global Times, also spoke out.
“Naturally, Chinese people are watching this scene with amusement,” he said on Weibo. “What everyone is most concerned about is, firstly, whether Trump will really go to jail, and secondly, whether he can still run for president?”
But analysts say a Trump conviction could be a sensitive issue for China’s state propagandists.
“On the one hand, it highlights a corrupt and fragmenting American democracy. On the other, it highlights how a former top leader can be arrested, tried, judged by a jury and convicted for a relatively minor act of corruption,” wrote Bill Bishop, a China watcher and author of the Cynosism newsletter.
China’s judicial system remains tightly subservient to the Communist Party regime, with a conviction rate of around 99 percent, legal experts say.
Bishop said the timing of the convictions also added to the sensitivity of the issue, coming just days before the 35th anniversary of Beijing’s bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in 1989.
So far, Chinese state media has not published the kind of scathing commentary that has appeared in previous coverage of Trump’s legal disputes.
Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, said Chinese state media was unlikely to report extensively on the matter going forward.
“They don’t want to attack Donald Trump because they know what the consequences would be if he becomes president. Instead, they will try to use it to highlight problems in the US system,” said Wu, the former China-based journalist.
“They really need to be careful about that.”
