Evan Vucci/AP
Former US President Donald Trump is surrounded by Secret Service agents after the assassination attempt on July 13, 2024.
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CNN
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As shocking footage of the assassination attempt on former U.S. President Donald Trump spread around the world on Saturday, news of the attack sparked widespread online interest on China’s heavily censored internet, with harsh criticism of the United States.
Discussion of the incident dominated Chinese social media in the hours after a gunman opened fire at a presidential rally for President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on Saturday evening.
Related hashtags have garnered hundreds of millions of views on Weibo, China’s X-shaped social media platform where Trump, whose presidency has played an outsized role in reshaping U.S.-China relations into their current, more confrontational one, has been a frequent subject of discussion, interest and often ridicule over the years.
Some social media users praised the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee for being “lucky” not to have suffered more serious injuries and praised his “quick reaction time”, while many others joked that the situation could help his re-election bid.
Trump, who claimed he was shot in the ear, was declared safe following the incident.
As shots rang out during his speech at the rally, the former president crouched on the ground and was protected by Secret Service agents, then, with blood visibly coming from his face and his fists raised in a defiant stance, was escorted off the stage by agents in an image widely shared around the world and in China.
“Based on his quick reactions and the agility with which he crouches, I would vote for Trump. US President Joe Biden would take much longer to crouch,” said one social media comment with thousands of likes, seemingly alluding to concerns about Biden’s age.
One blogger with more than one million followers said the incident made Trump look like a “traditional Hollywood president.”
Other commentators have pointed out eerie similarities between the incident and the 2022 assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, noting, for example, that the two former leaders did not end up “meeting” over the weekend.
There have also been repeated links between the attack and the spate of gun violence in the United States, which are frequently cited by Chinese state media as an example of the country’s failings.
“Gunshots ring out every day in the land of the free,” said one Weibo comment that received thousands of likes, while another said Trump would be “confirmed as the next president by gunshots.”
China’s Foreign Ministry released an official comment on Sunday, with a spokesman saying Chinese President Xi Jinping “expressed his sympathies” to Trump.
State media also weighed in to shape public opinion around the incident, with several commentaries and editorials portraying Saturday’s violence as a sign of American democracy, reflecting China’s long-standing argument that the U.S. political system is dysfunctional and inferior to its own.
An editorial published Sunday by state-run Beijing News claimed the incident “combined all the political symbols typical of American elections: violence, uncertainty and tough guys.”
The state-run nationalist tabloid Global Times on Monday published an opinion piece by a Beijing-based professor who said “the escalation of political polarization into violence shows that more people are despairing of American democracy.”
“Political polarization and violence stem from deep income inequality and a desperation for social change,” the article said, and the paper’s English-language edition repeated the theme in an editorial aimed at its international readers.
As such commentary spread in Chinese media, Biden took aim at so-called “foreign powers” who “stomp on the fires of our division” in an Oval Office speech on Sunday night.
Their aim is “to shape an outcome that is consistent with their interests, not ours,” Biden said, an apparent reference to concerns in Washington that China, Russia and other rivals are exploiting existing social divisions in the United States in their influence campaigns, which Beijing denies.
“Tonight, I ask all Americans to reflect anew on why America is so special,” the president said.
The attention on the assassination attempt in China will add to an already frequent online discussion of Trump in China. During his presidency, Trump was nicknamed “chuanjianguo,” or “(Chinese) nation-builder Trump,” a sarcastic phrase suggesting that his isolationist foreign policy and policy of division at home are actually helping Beijing overtake Washington on the world stage.
President Trump’s reelection efforts are also likely to be closely watched in Beijing, especially as the former president has warned he could raise tariffs if re-elected, which experts say could trigger a de facto decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies – something that would come as a shock to China as it grapples with a number of domestic fiscal problems.
