>> (i) trump / drumpf can win... <<
Wow, I had no idea that they love The Donald in China! :-)
Why China’s Not Afraid of Donald J. Trump
politico.com
“Trump is very, very popular among Chinese Internet users,” says Kecheng Fang, a former reporter in China who now researches Chinese media at the University of Pennsylvania.
Much of the Trump support in China boils down to his reputation overseas as a shrewd entrepreneur—an image that surely resonates with China’s plutocrats and aspirers. (“China today has this obsession with successful businessmen,” Shen notes.) Over the past decade, the Trump brand has been making inroads in the Chinese market, with the mogul promoting his Southeast Asia and U.S. luxury hotels specifically to Chinese travelers, in addition to looking for new locations in Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai. Trump himself has boasted about doing business with Chinese companies and leasing real estate to Chinese patrons. “I do great with China. I sell them condos. I have the largest bank in the world from China, the largest in the world by far,” he claimed last week. “They’re a tenant of mine in a building I own in Manhattan.”
Trump’s reality TV show, The Apprentice, also has a following in China, as does his daughter, Ivanka Trump, whose high-life-oriented Weibo account has 15,000 fans. The image of success and opulence that Trump cultivates has even led some Chinese businesses to coopt his surname—from the luxury toilet seat manufacturer Shenzhen Trump Industries to the Henan real estate firm Trump Consulting to the Anhui air purifier producer Trump Electronics.
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An article published last month in the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, noted that Trump’s snubs toward America’s Asian allies, namely Japan and South Korea, will allow China to become the dominant military power in the Pacific. Because the South China Sea isn’t oil rich, a Trump-led military would likely turn its attention away from Asia and toward the Middle East, says Shen, who last month published a widely circulated article in The Paper headlined “Do Not Rush to Say Trump Is Crazy.” “It seems like only wants to get involved in something militarily when there is a business benefit,” Shen argues.
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Trump’s apparently pliable views on human rights (he has expressed interest in bringing back torture, for one) and disregard for traditional bounds of discussion in American politics have helped him win fans from the more nationalistic corners of Chinese social media. In China, a strain of Islamophobia has emerged in response to both terror attacks abroad and outrage at Chinese affirmative-action policies that favor Muslim students in the scoring of the gaokao, the standardized college entrance exam. “Many Chinese share Trump’s anti-Muslim and anti-political-correctness sentiment,” says Fang, who has followed Trump-related discussions on Zhihu, China’s Quora equivalent. One particularly popular Zhihu post in support of Trump’s policy to ban Muslims from entering the United States reads, “A Western civilization dominated by political correctness is […] doomed to die.” The post received almost 10,000 upvotes. |
