News that a New York jury had found former US President Donald Trump guilty of falsifying business records to hide a large payment to a porn star drew huge interest – and mirth – in China, according to a report by CNN, which said the verdict was the top trending topic and racked up more than 120 million views by Friday afternoon on China’s Weibo, the social media platform like X/Twitter.
Some were quick to mock the outcome, with one joker posting: “Trump’s supporters, hurry up and mobilize, storm the Capitol,” under a brief by state news agency Xinhua, while another said “Comrade Nation Builder Trump should not be fighting alone,” it said, noting that Trump earned the nickname of Chuan Jianguo, or “Trump, the (Chinese) nation builder” during his time in office because “his isolationist foreign policy and divisive domestic agenda were helping Beijing to overtake Washington on the global stage.”
But other analysts noted that the verdict is a tricky issue for Beijing and one they are unlikely to target, because if he manages to become president again they could suffer the consequences. And, while the case casts a light on the strains in America’s democracy, it also leaves a shadow over China’s tightly controlled legal system, because it “highlights that a former top leader can be arrested, put on trial, judged by jury of peers and convicted, for relatively small acts of corruption.”
And that will be most obvious next Tuesday (June 4), on the 35th anniversary of the bloody massacre of protesters in Tiananmen Square.
Read the full report: CNN.
NOTE: The headline on this report was shortened to trim the length on June 1, 2024.
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