How Trump divides Chinese who aspire to democracy

Source: NYT (11/11/24)
How Trump Divides Chinese Who Aspire to Democracy
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A new HBO documentary about opposition to autocrats says a lot about the complex politics the president-elect inspires for people fleeing countries.
By Li Yuan

The long and loud campaign of Donald J. Trump, and now his re-election as president, have prompted deep divisions among many Chinese who advocate for democracy.

Wang Lixiong, a Beijing-based author, has been imprisoned and surveilled for his critical writings about China. The day before the election, he posted on X that Mr. Trump’s political alliance with the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk was worrying: “A Trump presidency combined with Musk’s influence may become a singularity that backfires on democracy.” People responded by condemning him, leaving hateful comments, including ones that wished him death.

Luo Yufeng, an online influencer who moved to New York more than a decade ago and posts about the possibilities that freedom brings, has also received abhorrent comments on her X account. She had been posting about her support for Mr. Trump, saying she opposed President Biden’s immigration policies.

On social media and around dinner tables, businesspeople, intellectuals and scholars I know who have fought side by side for democracy in China since the 1980s have been fighting one another over Mr. Trump. I have adopted a policy for gatherings with friends at my dining table in New York: No talk of American politics when we are eating.

I have been thinking a lot about China, democracy and Mr. Trump recently because of “Night Is Not Eternal,” a documentary by Nanfu Wang, a Chinese-born filmmaker I first met over a year ago. The film, which will debut on HBO on Nov. 19, is a moving portrayal of a Cuban activist, Rosa María Payá, who fights for democracy in her home country.

The two women met at a film festival in March 2016. Then in their 20s and early 30s, they found they were kindred spirits, having grown up under autocratic governments where speaking out was dangerous.

Ms. Wang was intimidated, questioned and assaulted by the police while making films in China. Her family was harassed by the authorities.

The film’s main subject, Ms. Payá, is the daughter of Oswaldo Payá, a dissident who was killed by the Cuban government in 2012. She and her family were forced to flee harassment and surveillance.

“Night Is Not Eternal,” which I have screened twice, leaving me in tears, is framed around the shared pursuit of freedom by Cuban and Chinese people. But it also tells a more personal story about what Ms. Wang saw as eroding democratic norms in the United States since Mr. Trump’s 2016 election. She speaks in the film about the birth of her first son in 2017.

“Becoming a mother changed the way I saw the country where I was living,” Ms. Wang, who now lives in New Jersey, narrates. “Until this moment, I had a casual relationship with America. Once I had a child here, the relationship became permanent and irrevocable. I became involved in this country’s future.”

Shortly after the two women met, Ms. Wang traveled to Havana to film Ms. Payá, who had returned from Miami, where she is living, to coordinate protests with artists and activists.

Visiting Cuba, Ms. Wang said, “felt like déjà vu.” She saw many things that resembled China: the revolutionary slogans on the walls, the many portraits of the top leader, the state security officers tailing people and the activists who remove their phone batteries at meetings to avoid surveillance.

Ms. Wang said she had made the documentary because she wondered how people living under authoritarianism could fight for change. The film’s first part focuses on Ms. Payá’s dedication to her cause and the sacrifices she and her family have made. Then it takes a turn. Ms. Wang says in the film that she was astonished to find that Ms. Payá was politically aligned with Mr. Trump.

Ms. Wang said she could not reconcile how Ms. Payá, a committed fighter for freedom, could find common ground with Mr. Trump. The film recounts the Jan. 6, 2021, assault by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol. Ms. Wang asks Ms. Payá whether she believed Mr. Trump really cared about democracy in Cuba.

Ms. Payá, speaking on camera, says she would meet with any leader as long as that person could help free Cuban people. Off camera, Ms. Wang says in the film, Ms. Payá told her that she worried that their on-camera conversation could alienate her supporters on both the Republican and Democratic sides.

Ms. Wang said she later came to understand Ms. Payá’s pragmatism, though she remained skeptical.

“The U.S.’s own democracy is in a precarious state — how could it be a beacon?” Ms. Wang, who became a naturalized American citizen two years ago, told me. “Pinning your hopes for democratization on another country seems futile.”

I asked Ms. Payá whether she shared Ms. Wang’s despair about the state of U.S. democracy. “There is no resemblance of that in Communist Cuba (or the C.C.P.’s China, for that matter),” she told me in a text message, using the initials for the Chinese Communist Party. “It’s not even apples to oranges; it’s apples to whales.”

On Wednesday, she congratulated Mr. Trump on his “historic victory” in a post on X and sought his support for a free Cuba.

But Ms. Wang sees a resemblance between Mr. Trump and the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, now in his third term as president.

In the film, Ms. Wang used video footage of Mr. Trump saying: “President Xi, president for life. President for life — that sounds good. Maybe we’re going to have to try it — president for life.” Mr. Xi changed the country’s Constitution in 2018 to effectively set himself to remain president for as long as he wanted. He has cracked down on anyone he perceives as his critic.

In Ms. Wang’s view, the freedom to choose the leader of one’s own country was what drew her and Ms. Payá, as well as many other Chinese and Cubans, to America.

Many Chinese, including members of the worldwide diaspora, support Mr. Trump because they believe he was the key to a necessary hardening of Washington’s policy toward China. Chen Guangcheng, a Chinese legal advocate who sought asylum at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in 2012 and was later brought to the United States by the Obama administration, endorsed Mr. Trump during a speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention. He remains supportive of Mr. Trump.

After Mr. Trump declared his victory early Wednesday, my Chinese social media feeds filled up with the delight of his supporters, as well as criticism of them.

“Americans are fortunate to have a president like Trump,” an e-commerce businessman with the surname Xiao wrote on WeChat. “And I hope one day I can cast a vote for a ‘Trump’ for my own country.”

Some Chinese who rebel against their authoritarian government line up with libertarian thinking of small government and individual autonomy, and are turned off by what many Republicans term cancel culture and identity politics.

Yuan Li, a movie star turned activist, posted an article on WeChat after Mr. Trump’s win, criticizing Chinese intellectuals, lawyers and journalists who, she believes, are unfairly critical of Mr. Trump. The post was shared widely.

On the other side, some of Mr. Trump’s Chinese critics used social media to share a translation of The New York Times’s editorial board’s opinion article from Wednesday, headlined “America makes a perilous choice.” China’s internet censors usually leave debates about U.S. domestic politics alone, possibly because the tussles over ideas reaffirm the government’s doctrinaire message that democracy is chaotic.

I asked Ms. Payá, the Cuban activist, how she thinks of the differences in politics that Ms. Wang portrays in her film, especially Ms. Wang’s surprise at her alignment with Mr. Trump. “I believe it’s part of democracy to have different views,” she said. “I do not expect that all my friends think the same as I think.”

Li Yuan writes The New New World column, which focuses on China’s growing influence on the world by examining its businesses, politics and society. More about Li Yuan