Why Do So Many Chinese Dissidents Support Trump?

On August 26, a blind Chinese lawyer took the stage of the Republican National Convention. Chen Guangcheng, long persecuted in China for his human rights advocacy, seemed an unlikely figure to appear at the event. In 2012, the administration of Democratic President Barack Obama had been instrumental in securing Chen passage to the United States after a daring flight to seek sanctuary in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Yet eight years later, there Chen was, declaring his support for Republican President Donald Trump.

“We need to support, vote, and fight for President Trump – for the sake of the world,” Chen told the audience.

Chen’s advocacy for Trump is striking. In the United States, Trump is denounced at every turn by human rights activists and political analysts alike for his authoritarian tendencies and refusal to uphold the basic principles of democracy, from the concept of a balance of powers and the independent functioning of other branches of government to freedom of the press. Meanwhile, Chen is a man who was arrested, beaten, and otherwise persecuted because of his outspoken insistence on human rights. Yet he has embraced Trump wholeheartedly.

And Chen is not alone. Among Chinese dissidents – people who have lost jobs, been jailed or forced into exile, and even suffered torture for their advocacy of democratic values and human rights – there is a strong current of support for Trump, coupled with contempt for his critics.

What’s going on?

One factor was made abundantly clear in Chen’s speech at the RNC: The old adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Trump’s administration has come out swinging at the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the CCP is an enemy of democracy and freedoms worldwide. Therefore, Trump must be a true defender of those values – or so the logic goes. 

Chen spent nearly all of his speech attacking the CCP for its abuses. “The CCP is an enemy of humanity. It is terrorizing its own people and it is threatening the well-being of the world,” he declared. He argued that Trump has “has shown the courage to wage that fight” against the CCP’s evils. In other words, his support for Trump boils down to one factor: the president’s willingness to combat the CCP.

Conversely, Chen attacked the Democratic Party for not standing up to the CCP enough – and not truly caring about human rights. He rebuked “The policy of appeasement of former administrations, including Obama and Biden, ” for allowing “the CCP to infiltrate and corrode different aspects of the global community.” 

It may seem ironic for Chen to castigate the Democrats over their lack of concern for rights when the Obama administration was responsible for his escape from China. But he’s right to note that Democratic presidents have been inconsistent at best in holding China to account over rights violations. In a YouTube video posted on September 26, part of a series following up on his RNC speech, Chen recounted the story of Obama’s first visit to China, in 2009, when he refused to meet with any human rights lawyers for fear of offending his Chinese hosts. Chen himself was in jail at the time for his advocacy.

There is real reason for disappointment and dashed hopes in the gap between the U.S. Democratic Party’s rhetoric on human rights and its actual advocacy on behalf of Chinese activists. In Chen, and many other dissidents, that has morphed into support for Trump and the Republicans’ tough new line – despite Trump’s own downplaying of certain rights issues (for instance, the oppression of Uyghurs and erosion of freedoms in Hong Kong) when it suits his trade agenda.

Chen is not alone in translating his anger toward the CCP and disillusionment with Democrats into support for Trump, while overlooking the bombastic president’s many flaws. In Hong Kong, many democracy activists have staked their hopes on support from the Trump administration – which leads not only to scenes of American flags waving in Hong Kong’s streets but expressions of personal admiration for Trump himself. A “March of Gratitude to the U.S.” in December 2019, meant to thank Washington for its support of the protest movement, included plenty of pro-Trump imagery, such as signs mimicking his election posters, but with text reading “Make Hong Kong Great Again” below the Trump name. Another popular sign depicted Trump shirtless and in boxing gear – presumably ready to go toe to toe with the CCP on Hong Kong’s behalf. 

It’s an odd look, to say the least, for a movement that prides itself on democratic values to seek support from a man many analysts warn is undermining U.S. democracy. The irony is not lost on Hong Kongers – some have urged their fellows to rethink their admiration for the U.S. president, especially after his militarized response to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. But to many of the Hong Kong protesters, their struggle has been ignored for so long that any friend in need is a friend indeed – including Trump.

As Jeffrey Ngo, who has become a high-profile advocate for Hong Kong protesters in Washington, D.C., put it in an interview with Wilfred Chan, “I see trying to win over the support of certain political leaders in Washington as a necessity… The current choice that we have is rejecting the China-led order first.” 

Even within China, support for Trump can double as a roundabout way of expressing criticism of the CCP. One Chinese journalist, speaking under condition of anonymity, told The Diplomat that trend – even more than Trump’s often-harsh words about China – is why the CCP has tightened its censorship of any postings that reference the U.S. president. Also according to the journalist, the more the Party criticizes Trump, the more popular he becomes among a certain subset of the population. Many Chinese instinctively distrust anything the government or state media have to say, and they assume Trump must be doing something right to be so frequently catisgated by the CCP.

So there is a clear facet of pro-Trump sentiment that is motivated mostly by opposition to the CCP. But there are limits to the theory that dissidents’ support for Trump is “purely tactical,” as Yao Lin put it in an article for the Journal of Contemporary China. Instead, Lin argues that China’s liberals have actually undergone a “Trumpian metamorphosis,” absorbing the values espoused by Trump – values that, to most activists in the United States, are directly antithetical to democracy and human rights.

This is less paradoxical than it would seem. In actuality, most Chinese “liberals” are more aligned with what would be considered the conservative bloc in the United States. The scars of the Cultural Revolution have made Chinese who came of age in the 1960s and ‘70s extremely cautious about any calls to remake existing social structures in the name of the greater good. Most Chinese dissidents want minimal government interference, especially when it comes to the economy. Chinese in this camp look at the Democratic Party’s increasing turn toward higher taxes and wealth redistribution and readily agree with the charges of “socialism” levied by the Republicans. Similarly, many Chinese dissidents are strongly against “political correctness” – seen as overly cumbersome restrictions on free speech – and juxtapose it with their experiences of censorship and persecution for blacklisted ideas in China. 

“The election of Trump is, therefore, a necessary evil (if an evil at all) to prevent the U.S. from steering towards the wrong direction led by a leftward-moving Democratic Party longing for ‘progressivist revolution,’” Lin writes, summarizing a widespread view among Chinese liberals.

Underpinning this is the inescapable fact that Chinese dissidents have directly suffered at the hands of a self-proclaimed socialist state. Many, especially those who have found refuge abroad, hold up the West, and more specifically the United States, as a paragon of freedom. This conception, which Lin calls “beaconism,” predisposes Chinese liberals to ignore or even explain away systemic issues in the United States – for example, institutionalized racism – that are often highlighted by Democrats (and the CCP, for that matter). 

The end result is that the Chinese language Twitter feeds of many U.S.-based dissidents are devoted to praising Trump and attacking the Democrats in equal measure. It’s clear from this discourse that their support for the current president is not limited to satisfaction with his administration’s tough stance on China. Rather, activist and economist He Qinglian argued that the reason most Chinese don’t support Democrats is because they remember the “harm of socialism” from their time in China. He has also dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement as a “Marxist party,” intent on seizing power through a populist revolution. 

Meanwhile, Yaxue Cao, the founder of China Change, a human rights advocacy group, has been tweeting widely about the supposed censorship of pro-conservative content on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. She repeatedly compared Twitter to the CCP’s censorship regime.

Pro-Trump attiudes are far from universal; even a single person can have mixed feelings. 1989 Tiananmen protest leader Zhou Fengsuo, for example, has denounced Biden for his conciliatory approach to China, but also criticized Trump’s ban on WeChat, an app widely used by the Chinese diaspora. 

Teng Biao, a prominent exiled dissident currently residing in New York, is one of the few taking an outspoken stance against Trump. He told the BBC in 2019 that he sees the president as “morally defected,” with “no interests in improving China’s human rights.” 

However, he believes that anti-Trump voices are a minority among Chinese dissidents.