As dramatic images of the failed assassination attempt on former US President Donald Trump spread around the world Saturday, news of the attack also sparked immerse online interest – as well as pointed criticism of the US – on China’s heavily censored internet.
Discussion of the assassination attempt, in which a gunman opened fire at a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday evening, dominated Chinese social media in the hours after the attack.
Related hashtags garnered hundreds of millions of views on China’s X-like social media platform Weibo, where Trump – who as president played an outsized role reframing the US-China relationship into the more contentious one that exists today – has for years been a frequent subject of discussion, fascination and often ridicule.
Some social media users were quick to hail former president and presumptive Republican US presidential nominee as “lucky” that he didn’t sustain more serious injury and praised Trump’s “quick reflexes,” while many others made quips about how the situation would boost his re-election bid.
Trump, who said 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 ducked to the ground and was covered by Secret Service agents. He then raised his fist in a defiant pose with blood visible on his face before agents took him off the stage – a gesture captured in an image widely shared worldwide and in China.
“Just judging by his quick reaction and agility to duck, I’d vote for Trump. I bet (US President Joe) Biden would take ages to crouch down,” read one social media comment that got thousands of likes and appeared to allude to concerns about Biden’s age.
One blogger with over a million followers noted that the incident made Trump look more like a “a traditional Hollywood president.”
Other commentators made morbid parallels between the incident and the 2022 assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, for example noting that the two ex-leaders did not end up “meeting” over the weekend.
There were also repeated links made between the attack and recurring instances of gun violence in the United States, which are often highlighted by Chinese state media as an example of the country’s failings.
“In the land of liberty, gunshots ring out every day,” said one comment on Weibo with several thousand likes, while another said Trump would be “confirmed as the next president with gunfire.”
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs put forward an official comment Sunday, with a spokesperson saying Chinese leader Xi Jinping “expressed sympathy” to Trump.
State-linked media also stepped in to shape public discussion around the incident. Several op-eds or editorials published by such outlets framed Saturday’s violence as a symptom of American democracy, echoing Beijing’s longstanding rhetorical push to portray the US political system as dysfunctional and inferior to its own.
An editorial published by the state-linked Beijing News on Sunday claimed the incident had “combined all the political symbols typical of an American election: violence, uncertainty, and tough guys.”
State-run nationalist tabloid Global Times on Monday published an op-ed from a Beijing-based professor describing how “the escalation of political polarization into violence shows that more people are feeling hopeless about American democracy.”
“Political polarization and violence stem from severe income inequality and hopelessness about social change,” the piece said, while the outlet’s English-language arm repeated similar themes in an editorial for international audiences.
As such commentary filtered across China’s media, Biden, in an Oval Office address Sunday evening, took aim at what he described as “foreign actors” who “fan the flames of our division.
Their aim is “to shape the outcomes consistent with their interests, not ours,” Biden said in an apparent reference to Washington’s concern that China, Russia and other rivals are playing on existing social divisions in the US in influence campaigns, something Beijing denies.
“Tonight, I’m asking every American to recommit …. (to) think about what’s made America so special,” the US president said.
The rapt focus on the attempted assassination in China adds to what has already been frequent discussion of Trump on the Chinese internet, where he earned the nickname “Chuan Jianguo,” or “Trump, the (Chinese) nation builder” during his time in office – a quip to suggest his isolationist foreign policy and divisive domestic agenda were actually helping Beijing to overtake Washington on the global stage.
Trump’s re-election bid is also believed to be watched closely in Beijing, not least because the former president has threatened, if re-elected, to raise tariffs that experts say could trigger a de facto decoupling between the US and Chinese economies – a shock that would hit as China grapples with numerous internal fiscal challenges.