Chinese state media worked hard Tuesday to convey the sense that Beijing has low expectations for Joe Biden’s presidency, penning editorials that asserted the American system is collapsing, the coronavirus proved representative democracy does not work, and Biden will not be able to undo President Donald Trump’s policy changes toward China.
The Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily described the Wuhan coronavirus as a “mirror” that showed Americans their country is broken beyond repair.
The People’s Daily found it especially unbelievable that groups and individuals in America have the power to thwart the will of the ruling party, deriding it as “vetocracy” or “rule by veto.” For that matter, the Communist paper saw “polarization” as the inevitable result of allowing multiple parties and ideologies, unlike sensible one-party, authoritarian China.
As Chinese media has so often done over the past year, the People’s Daily argued that polarized multi-party countries with non-tyrannical central governments are ill-equipped to deal with a crisis like the Chinese coronavirus pandemic:
There is an old saying: “The water that keeps a ship afloat can also upset it.” The U.S. failed to pool strong synergy in the fight against the pandemic and more than 290,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus], which leads to rising public anger.
Some U.S. politicians viewed the pandemic as an opportunity to seize power and partisan interests, instead of making the health and safety of Americans their primary task, which only aggravated deep-rooted contradictions.
American groups with different political stances resorted to protests to take their frustration out, which even turned into violent conflicts.
The state-run Global Times gave even a “seasoned centrist and pragmatic person like Biden” little chance to resolve partisan divisions or reverse “Trumpization”:
During Trump’s four-year presidency, the US has been deeply branded as “Trumpization,” and these marks are likely to be very difficult to erase even in Biden’s entire tenure. Adjustments will work, but they can hardly uproot something that is already deep-rooted in US society. After all, it is the US that has nourished Trump’s policies.
Li Haidong, a professor at the Institute of International Relations of China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Tuesday that relatively pragmatic in handling foreign and domestic affairs, Biden is more likely to make a corresponding choice after screening the actual needs with regard to the issue of de-Trumpization.
“He won’t completely overthrow the so-called political legacies of Trump,” Li noted. For example, Biden could partly agree with Trump’s phase-1 trade deal with China and the high tariffs the US imposed on others, while remaking the approach to issues like “America First” and Obamacare.
“U.S. political elites are trying their best to prevent their country from continuing on the downward track, be it Biden’s election or de-Trumpization measures. But how effective will the measures be? Only time will tell,” the Global Times concluded.
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