Why Trump Means Nothing Good for China According to Xiao Gongqin

"The possibility of an entente between the US and Russia should absolutely not be ignored."

Today’s edition features a crosspost from David Ownby’s wonderful blog, Reading the China Dream, which I love reading and highly recommend. — Thomas

Xiao Gongqin (b. 1946) is a scholar of history and politics and a fixture at any number of universities in Shanghai. He is best known for his support of neo-authoritarianism as the best way for a country like China to achieve the stability necessary for economic growth and eventually democracy. He first made these arguments under Deng Xiaoping and is continuing to make them under Xi Jinping (see here for a text from 2024, in Chinese). Xiao is also the kind of intellectual who writes frequently on current events in China and the world, as he is doing in the text translated here on the recent re-election of Donald Trump. The American election provoked such a billowing, exhausting mushroom cloud of partisanship, disinformation, and blather throughout the entire world that I can barely bring myself to read anything more about Trump 2.0. But Tr…