China on Wednesday mocked the still too-close-to-call U.S. presidential election, likening it to one in a developing country and describing the United States as a nation “without hope.”
The state-run media outlets Global Times and the Xinhua News Agency were among the first to take aim at America, while social media users on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, were quick to drag the democratic process.
President Trump’s near-constant complaints of voter fraud also became fodder for the Asian nation.
“Whether [Trump] wins or loses, his final mission is to destroy the appearance of American democracy,” one user wrote on Weibo.
“Let Trump be reelected and take the U.S. downhill,” another user posted, and a third user compared the president’s early claim of victory to claiming the pot in mahjong, a strategic tile-based game, before the round was up, Reuters reported.
Ming Jinwei, the deputy foreign editor of the Xinhua News Agency, described the U.S. as “without hope.”
China, like many countries around the world, watched the U.S. vote count.
As of Wednesday morning, the contest between Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden was still razor-thin in key battleground states.
With no media network or election official calling the race, Trump declared himself the victor.
China also took shots at Trump’s premature assertion that he had won.
A popular meme circulated online that showed an electoral map in the shape of China, colored red to show Trump having 270 Electoral College votes — the amount needed to win the presidency. In the days leading up to Tuesday’s vote, Chinese coverage and commentary had been relatively tame, but over the weekend, state-run media outlets started to pick up on U.S. news reports on surging gun sales and business owners around the country bracing for election-related chaos by boarding up their stores.
“This kind of unrest is usually complication of elections in poor countries, but people are worried it may appear in the US,” Hu Xijin, the editor of the Global Times, tweeted.
He later ridiculed pre-election polling that had predicted an easy Biden win. China has also made a concerted effort to slam the U.S. for its surging coronavirus numbers.
On the campaign trail, Trump and his allies hammered China at every turn, accusing the country of unleashing the coronavirus on the rest of the world. Trump has repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as “the China virus.”
Marion Smith, the executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C., said that regardless of the outcome, China should be worried.
“Whether it’s Joe Biden or Donald Trump, the next president of the United States will likely take a hard line on China,” he wrote in an opinion piece in USA Today. “Both candidates have stalked out claims to have a tougher policy. This competition is good for American interests — China is the greatest threat to America’s security, economy and values — and while it should have happened years ago, it’s better later than never.”
