Trumpism in the Online Sinosphere‽

The next speaker at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the fabulous Jing Zeng, whose focus is on Trumpism in the online Sinosphere. There was a lot of public animosity between presidents Trump and Xi during Trump’s term in office, but there also appears to be a surprising amount of support for Trump both within China as well as in the Chinese diaspora around the world. Chinese-Americans were one of the groups of Asian-Americans with the greatest amount of support for Trump, in fact.

The e-commerce platform Taobao sells Buddha figures with Trump’s face, for example; such figures express an appreciation for the ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan and seek to translate it to other contexts.

For the period of 2017 and 2023, Jing gathered some 225,000 posts from Weibo, which addressed a variety of topics; out of these, she is examining gender and women’s rights and immigration discussions – the two topics that generated the greatest amount of engagement. Such posts often appreciated Trump’s stance against transgender people and his hardline views on immigration, even if on other matters he took anti-Chinese positions.

These are not mainstream topics for China, so there is little first-hand understanding of these issues amongst Chinese netizens. They may therefore be using the US as a proxy for understanding the public debate on these issues.

For the period of 2013 to 2023, Jing also gathered a similar dataset of 2.3 million posts from Twitter, which covers the Chinese diaspora rather than mainland Chinese users. Topics related to activism and patriotism were especially strong here, and this can be exemplified by the discussion of the ‘New Federal State of China’ (NFSC), an idea promoted by controversial expat Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui in collaboration by far-right agitator Steve Bannon.

The NFSC is promoted by a very aggressive social media campaign on Twitter, including even some music videos that feature Guo, some of which are actively pushing conspiracy theories that align with similar conspiracy theories pushed by Donald Trump. (Guo has now been arrested by the FBI for defrauding his supporters.)

On the very other side of the discussion, there is a much smaller group of Trump supporters in the Chinese diasporic Twittersphere. These, too, support Trump, however (and may engage in some influence operations), presumably because he will be a more China-friendly president than Joe Biden.