cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51706028
This is an op-ed by Martin Moore, senior lecturer in Political Communication Education and Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication, and Power at King’s College London; and Thomas Colley, senior visiting research fellow in War Studies at King’s College London and senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.
US President Donald Trump thrives on unpredictability. One day he will warn the world that the United States is about to impose punishing tariffs. The next he will send American troops to depose a foreign leader. The one after he will threaten to attack the territory of an ally [...] If his ambiguous threats and arbitrary punishments disorient, confuse, and cow other nations, so his logic goes, they will increase America’s power.
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Yet the real beneficiary is China because Trump’s belligerent, volatile, chaotic approach fits perfectly with the narratives that the Chinese Communist Party has been nurturing for years. For over a decade, China has pursued a systematic and global campaign to “tell its story well.” The hero of its story is the CCP, portrayed as an enlightened ruler that has brought order and prosperity to China and more recently to the world. In diplomacy it professes no desire to interfere with state sovereignty (providing its own is respected) and only seeks “win-win outcomes” through partnership and trade. Across state news outlets, social media, and even state-approved children’s bedtime stories, China brings peace and prosperity; its international investments through the Belt and Road Initiative are the benevolent Xi Jinping’s “gift to the world.”
In the CCP-constructed version of reality, the United States is the global villain. Washington is a militaristic, destabilizing international actor that seeks not partnership but subjugation. Its political system is not democratic but plutocratic (ruled for the 1 percent, not the 99). When it does not get its way internationally, it imposes it by force—be it in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or more recently Venezuela.
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The CCP’s propaganda wins extend to domestic US politics too, where every street protest, ICE killing, or government shutdown reinforces Beijing’s claims that its political system brings stability and growth while US-style democracy brings dysfunction and division. In Trump’s reality, that disorder is a means to an end—an authoritarian-populist doom loop in which he portrays “American carnage” so that he can position himself as the country’s only savior. But for Beijing, it is ammunition for an alternative reality that it has been promoting enthusiastically: that China is now the preeminent force for global order and the “democracy” the world should emulate.
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To many this may read as Orwellian Doublespeak—dictatorship = democracy. By most indicators—freedom of expression, judicial independence, individual human rights, repression of minorities—China is a world-leading dictatorship, not a world-leading democracy. Yet the CCP claims that, unlike the US, China’s political system is genuinely responsive to people’s needs. The party says that it maintains a constant dialogue with the public and is always sensitive to public sentiment. So even if Chinese citizens cannot vote for their leaders (apart from local elections where they can select from a clutch of party-approved CCP candidates), democracy with “Chinese characteristics” is superior to US democracy because the CCP actually represents the Chinese people.
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The result of this is unlikely to be that global citizens start believing that China is democratic. But that is not the CCP’s priority. What it wants more—and appears to be achieving—is to minimize international criticism of its political system and its actions. Across much of the Global South, and indeed in the West, it is becoming increasingly rare to read news about domestic repression in China, human rights abuses in Xinjiang, or popular protests across China’s vast hinterland. People are more likely to read about the latest Trump threat or his latest slur about their country than news critical of Beijing.
Yet Trump risks giving China an even greater victory. One of the CCP’s longstanding aims has been to marginalize Western ideas like individual human rights, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly in Chinese political discourse and international diplomacy. In showing open contempt for these values at home and abroad, Trump is giving China a bigger propaganda victory than the CCP’s often bland propaganda could ever have achieved by itself. In Trump’s reality he is making America great again. But in actual reality he is doing far more to make China great again.
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