Most people in Vietnam, a country that has long-standing conflicts with China over the South China Sea dispute, supported Donald Trump in his unsuccessful re-election campaign, while ignoring the fact that Trump’s isolationist policies in the past four years have kept discrediting U.S. global leadership and helped China boost its influence around the world.
In September, nearly 80% of the total 49,000 Vietnamese people participating in an online survey from VnExpress, the most-read newspaper in Vietnam, supported Trump to retain his office.
President Trump waved a Vietnamese flag in his visit to Vietnam in March 2019. Photo by Saul Loeb / AFP/Getty Images.
In a poll conducted by APIAVote, AAPI Data, and Asian-Americans Advancing Justice with 1,569 Asian Americans in the U.S. last month, Trump trailed in every groups’ polling results, except for the Vietnamese Americans, who supported Trump over Democratic contender JoeBiden 48% to 36%. The other voting groups, including Japanese, Asian Indian, Korean, Chinese, Filipino, favored Biden.
“Trump expresses his hostile attitude towards China frankly and aggressively. As a Vietnamese, I think it’s fair enough,” RFI, a France-based media outlet, quoted Vo Dang Khoa, a Vietnamese American lawyer residing in Texas.
Vietnamese American is the only Asian American group showing support over Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. election. Graphics by Asian American Voter Survey 2020.
Explaining this phenomenon, Rick Dunham, an American professor at China’s Tsinghua University, said that Trump’s “straightforward” and “unguarded” traits were well received in countries that politicians seemed to be “boring,” such as in China, Vietnam or Cuba.
“Average people in China like Trump’s personality,” confirmed Yunyun Liu, associate executive editor and columnist at Beijing Review. “He is interesting and funny. It is something that kind of lacks here in Chinese society.”
As opposed to Vietnamese people’s viewpoints that Trump’s victory would be a disadvantage to China, Chinese people perceive it as more good than harmful.
“You can make America eccentric and thus hateful for the world,” Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Global Times, an English-language newspaper under the Chinese nationalist paper People’s Daily, wrote in a tweet directed at the U.S. president. “You help promote unity in China.”
While many believe that Biden’s win will quickly boost Sino-U.S. relations, Chinese analysts say the relationship has already been in a tough period, and Joe Biden’s keeping decent Sino-U.S. relations may balance out China’s rising power globally.
“We see that when Biden puts the U.S. back to the Climate Accord, it would strengthen the U.S. global leadership and inadvertently weaken China’s position in the global climate change fight,” Liu said.
Max Boot, a columnist covering national security, noted that no one did more to help China than Trump in one of his articles on The Washing Post. During Trump’s presidency, Washington has pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Iran nuclear deal, while China has been implementing an ambitious Asian trade agreement without the U.S., playing a major role in WHO’s COVAX initiative to fight against coronavirus worldwide, and negotiating a strategic pact with Iran that could lead to $400 billion in Chinese investment over 25 years.
“Trump helps Beijing with his anti-globalist agenda,” Boot noted. “Trump is creating a power vacuum that [Chinese President] Xi can fill.”
Since 2013, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) aims to develop a vast economic zone with China-invested infrastructure development projects in countries across the Eurasian region, has been understood as one of the concrete manifestations of President Xi Jinping’s “Chinese dream” of rejuvenation from national humiliation. The BRI has become a strong focus of China in recent years.
“Asian countries were looking for alternative solutions because they were not getting what they needed from the existing infrastructure,” said Zoon Ahmed Khan, a Pakistani researcher based in the Belt and Road Strategy Institute at Tsinghua University. “For Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and maybe many post-conflict societies that were just not able to get loans for much-needed infrastructure, China was able to fill that vacuum.”
Kristina Helenius, CEO of NordicWest USA, and the former press counselor for the Embassy of Finland in the U.S., said that whoever would win, the great power competition had begun between China and the U.S. “There’s going to be two powers that are not in good terms,” she said.
Vietnamese people should be well aware of this truth before doing any extreme actions, just as lawyer Khoa acknowledged that America only did what benefited America.
“They may be against China, but it doesn’t mean that Vietnam will benefit,” he said.
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