Thread by @ericfish85

I continue to be perplexed by the overseas dissidents and others who think Trump is their great hope to bring about the fall of the Communist Party in China. Not sure what he's done to budge the Party's hold on power by one inch.

Trump has provided a steady stream of examples of dysfunctional “Western democracy,” which aide in the CCP’s ongoing effort to convince its people that one-party rule is far more preferable.

Trump/Navarro/Miller/Bannon et al provided cartoonish faces of American bad faith and the idea that the US ultimately just wants to keep China down. This helps rally domestic Chinese support for the CCP, and it especially empowers hardliners within the Party.

Trump’s trade war did give an economic punch that may have chipped at the economic pillar the CCP's legitimacy partly rests on, but it also helped boost CCP narrative that the US is acting in bad faith and just wants to push China’s collapse, helping reinforce nationalism pillar.

And China already had massive economic problems of its own making pre-Trump. The trade war helped shift blame to the US for economic hardships, whether they were actually a result of the trade war or unrelated preexisting problems.

Then there’s Trump’s mishandling of coronavirus that made the CCP look very good by comparison after its initial fuck up. One survey found domestic trust in the CCP has gone UP in the past year.

https://twitter.com/ericfish85/status/1281595078314725377

Trump’s insistence on saying things like “Chinese virus” encourages racism, alienates Chinese in the US and Chinese admirers of the US, and his policies make life miserable for Chinese students. This sort of treatment also boosts Chinese support of the CCP
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

If your goal is to vanquish the CCP, you’re probably going to need the buy-in of a decent chunk of the Chinese public, and Trump has been antithetical to that. To an extent, Trump has been a rallying, unifying force for CCP supporters.

And one thing that’s probably also necessary for the CCP to “collapse” is factional splits within the top Party leadership that allow grassroots opposition to spread, and again, giving a more potent external enemy to unite factions against works toward the opposite of that.

It’s questionable how much any US leader could do to really weaken the CCP’s hold on power, if that was indeed their goal, but Trump has probably actually strengthened it in many ways.

And this perhaps another question altogether, but if you’re thinking that the CCP will be destroyed by Trump’s “tough on China” approach, I have yet to see a coherent, realistic “then what?” plan. How do you go from that to something where China is any better off than before?