[wikipedia.org]
On 31 May, after a 6-week trial plus nine hours of jury deliberations according to an unprecedented 55 pages of jury instructions from the presiding trial judge, former President Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal payments made to a pornographic film actress. The indictment by a New York grand jury that led to the trial – the first of a former US president in American history was approved on 30 March 2023 – was approved just four months after President Trump declared his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
The trial, the verdict, and the outfall from the first-ever conviction of a former US president are all about optics, happening as they did in the middle of the 2024 presidential campaign, and those optics are not just related to US domestic politics and questions about a trial in which the defendant was refused the ability to defend himself in court by a severely compromised judge. The implications for friends and likely adversaries are profound and potentially earth-shaking.
Let us examine how the Chinese Communist Party almost certainly views the verdict.
COMMUNIST CHINA’S TWO GOALS
China has two goals: (1) the Chinese Communist Party must retain political control over all the Chinese worldwide, and (2) China must replace the United States as the world’s only superpower. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pitched several “global initiatives” since he came to power in 2012 in order to set the table for Chinese world hegemony, including the Belt and Road Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Development Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative (perhaps the most grandiose of all).
These initiatives include mechanisms for promoting the CCP’s vision of “universal rules and standards” around the world as a replacement for the Western-dominated international order, with the result being a “Chinese New World Order” led by the communists at Zhongnanhai. That last initiative attempts to convince the world that all civilizations and cultures are essentially equivalent – including communism with Chinese characteristics – while advocating non-interference and relativism principles in order to redirect attention away from the CCP’s gruesome human rights record.
China has been pursuing a coordinated strategy to displace the US for over a decade. It involves subterfuge, outright theft of Western knowhow, bribery, intimidation, cultural diplomacy via the United Front Work Department and the ubiquitous “people-to-people” propaganda, co-opting international organizations (particularly the UN), debt-trap diplomacy, and the rapid build-up of People’s Liberation Army to coerce and influence foreign governments as needed. The strategy amounts to hybrid warfare against the US and its allies in which the CCP “deploy[s] all aspects of physical and non-physical state power, including civil society, to confront an adversary [the US] indirectly. This includes highly coordinated and relentless information warfare attacks on the international order, the US, and its allies by Chinese state-run media and the communist Chinese diplomatic corps.
The result of these efforts has been what some of those who back China engagement policies view as “the inevitable ascendancy of China.” China’s trajectory over the past several decades has seen the country consolidate manufacturing concerns while developing an enormous export economy built on the backs of cheap capital and even cheaper labor. China has become the number two economy in the world – at the expense of that same world, unfortunately.
ENTER DONALD TRUMP
In 2017, newly elected US President Donald Trump embarked on a mission to restore the trade balance between the US and China by implementing billions of dollars of tariffs on Chinese products. He also scrapped the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in favor of the new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement that specifically targeted “non-market economies” such as China by the inclusion of Article 32.10 in the USMCA. Canada and Mexico were required to give advance notice to the US about any new trade agreements with China under threat of terminating the entire USMCA.
The Trump administration also refocused US military emphasis in Asia by refocusing the major US combatant command in the region – US Pacific Command – as US Indo-Pacific Command while simultaneously strengthening ties among four key democracies (India, Japan, Australia, and the US) by refocusing the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue on China.
The Trump administration’s focus of China included counterintelligence operations, putting pressure on Confucius Institutes operating in America, and a new trade deal with China that was the centerpiece of a renewed American skepticism about the underlying factors of the rise of China that was exacerbated as COVID-19 spread around the world from Hubei province in China.
RETURN TO ENGAGEMENT
The Biden presidency has seen a slow but steady return to China engagement since January 2021 although many of the Trump-era tariffs remain in place (and even a few have been recently added). The increasing engagement with China, including Biden policies beneficial to China, was previously summarized here and here.
The CCP would certainly like to continue the trajectory of the Biden administration in pursuit of its strategic goal to replace the US as the world’s superpower.
US CHAOS BENEFITS CHINA
Sowing chaos among one’s adversaries is an important element of Chinese strategy. As Sun Tzu stated, ““in the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.” Replacing the liberal international world order with a new system dominated by communist China can be achieved by diminishing the US from within (political and economic chaos), as well as by simply out-competing the US through mercantilist practices. Domestic chaos in the US is a weapon that the CCP employs through UFWD activities and support of radical groups in the US like Black Lives Matter.
The political divide in the US has further been exacerbated by the Trump conviction in New York City. Given China’s tight control over social media and political discourse in general (only accepted narratives are allowed), the signs are very clear that the CCP is quite happy with the jury’s verdict, as the communists would almost certainly prefer a continuation of the Biden administration as opposed to having to deal with Donald Trump again. As reported by Breitbart, “The Chinese Foreign Ministry refused to address the matter directly [but] on Weibo, however — a highly regulated platform where opinions contrary to those of the Party are rapidly censored and used to diminish the ‘social credit’ score of users — the regime allowed users to mock Trump and fantasize about a civil war in America.”
The free reign given by the communist Chinese regime to such rabble-rousing by Chinese netizens (i.e., people who are actively involved in online communities or the internet in general) is a clear indication of official Chinese sentiments. A US civil war would be the ultimate chaos from which China would directly benefit, and thus that social media banter has not been squelched by Chinese censors.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Breitbart wasn’t the only Western media that noticed Chinese glee on social media after the Trump verdict. As part of the continuing information warfare in the US, the Chinese were only too happy to see CNN and even US government-sponsored Voice of America News report on the various anti-Trump sentiments on Chinese social media.
Who gains from the kangaroo court decision? The political optics are transparent: a grand jury indictment on election related charges that the Dept of Justice and Federal Election Commission previously refused to pursue; a hand-picked Democrat jury; a Soros-backed Democrat prosecutor; a Democrat judge whose daughter has raised millions in donations as a result of the trial; the Trump defense team prevented by the judge from bringing forth credible expert witnesses; the unprecedented gag order on a former US president that a New York appeals court refused to review; and a road-map to conviction from the judge in the form of 55 pages of jury instructions. And the entire prosecution on years-old charges brought only after Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president.
The verdict has greatly exacerbated the partisan political divide in the US and has dominated US media in recent weeks while the world watches with mixed feelings of concern, horror, confusion, and laughter. Except those feelings aren’t mixed at all in Beijing. On this special occasion, Zhongnanhai reverberated with cries of 恭喜(gōng xǐ – congratulations).
The end.