'Chaojia' chatter: what the Chinese are saying about the raid on Trump's home

Week in China (and this newsletter) are back after our annual summer fortnight break.

This the 25th edition of my weekly newsletter. As the Editor of Week in China I read a lot of articles about China. Here I share with my LinkedIn connections a selection of links to some of the best articles we've published in Week in China (WiC) in our most recent edition, but also point out articles from other sources I've found of interest.

To register for a complimentary subscription to Week in China use?this personal invite?from me.

After a lengthy absence Donald Trump was back on our cover last Friday. The raid on his Mar-a-Lago home by the FBI had special resonance for the Chinese.

One of the most feared punishments in imperial China was called?chaojia, a term for ransacking a house and confiscating all of the possessions within. Action like this was sometimes taken against senior officials that had fallen from grace. It was not uncommon to see the punished mandarins subsequently exiled or even executed (their extended family could suffer retribution too).

Easily the best-known example of?chaojia?in Chinese history related to Heshen, reputed to be the richest man in the world during the eighteenth century. A trusted aide of Emperor Qianlong, Heshen also went down in history as probably the most corrupt official in the Qing empire. Just a week after Qianlong’s death, the new emperor gave a silk cord to Heshen to hang himself. His belongings – as reported by royal investigators – were said to be worth 15 years of the Qing empire’s annual income (see our book An A-Z of Chinese History).

Chinese bloggers have been using the term?chaojia??as a metaphor for the predicament of Donald Trump, whose home was ransacked by agents last week – at the behest of the Department of Justice – on allegations that he had fallen foul of his own country’s espionage laws by taking top secret documents (the Washington Post says some of them involved highly classified information about the US nuclear arsenal).

Beijing’s media mouthpieces have stayed largely silent and refrained from offering a fuller response. However, in one of the few reports about the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, the Xinhua news agency reported this week on rising concerns about political violence in the US. “Violent threats and calls for ‘civil war’ erupted on pro-Trump forums online, with some far-right figures publicly spreading violent rhetoric,” it noted. After an armed man was fatally wounded trying to attack an FBI office in Ohio, Xinhua took further note, warning of an increase in deadly threats posted on social media against federal officials and facilities.

Throughout the 246 years of the American republic, several presidents have been assassinated but none imprisoned. In 1974 Gerald Ford gave an unconditional pardon to his predecessor Richard Nixon for crimes he might have committed during the Watergate scandal. But Washington-watchers in China generally believe this precedent no longer holds amid the toxic environment that is gripping much of the American political scene.

That belief seems to be shared by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who accused the Democrats of breaking a 240-year tradition by “prosecuting your predecessor”.

Should Trump return to the White House in 2024, the first thing he would do is “raid every one of Biden’s houses”, Giuliani also warned.

All of this adds to the ‘Koreanisation’ of American politics, claims Zhan Hao, one of China’s most highly paid bloggers on current affairs (most of his articles carry the coveted ‘100K-plus’ label, which means they have been read more than 100,000 times on WeChat), referring to South Korea’s troubled history of prosecuting and imprisoning its retired presidents.

In a thread that has triggered more than 2,000 replies on Zhihu, China’s most popular question-and-answer forum, a contributor called ‘Flying Panzer’ claimed the?numerous legal cases against Trump were driven by “political motives” and he advised onlookers to read Mark Twain’s Running for Governor should they want to understand more about the seamy underside of American politics.

On balance the bulk of the bloggers don’t get too bogged down in the rights and wrongs of Trump actually moving boxes of national secrets to his Florida home. Flying Panzer seems to believe all former president do that sort of thing. Instead their analysis confines itself almost exclusively to exploring the moves in terms of power politics and what it means for a likely White House comeback for Dong Wang [a popular Chinese nickname for Trump, meaning ‘the king who knows’, a reference to his catchphrase of ‘I know more than anyone…’].

In the view of Hu Xijin, the editor of the Global Times, Trump looks set to play heavily on his ‘victim’ status and use it to try to emerge as the presidential victor in 2024.

“I suspect Trump will soon announce his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election. In this way all allegations and lawsuits against him would look like retribution against an election candidate,” Hu wrote on his own social media account. “There is no certainty that Trump will win… But he will definitely make the election as entertaining as ever,” Hu added.

If Trump is indicted in the next couple of months – he faces multiple Federal investigations and lawsuits as well as those at the state level (a Grand Jury in Georgia is looking into whether the former president criminally interfered with its 2020 election) –?the Supreme Court may even have to rule constitutionally on whether he is eligible to stand for the presidency. Perhaps as many as a third of American voters will believe Trump when he say this is all about the ‘deep state swamp’ conspiring to keep him from returning to the Oval Office. All of this could spark violent backlashes from his more die hard supporters (the January 6 attack on the Capitol and the attack on the FBI office in Ohio offer ominous precedents).

A situation like this will allow the Chinese to contrast the chaos in Washington with their own leadership selection process, which will be finalised at the 20th Party Congress scheduled for the autumn (there’s no formal date announced for the key gathering but it should happen in about 10 weeks).

Of course, Xi Jinping isn’t expected to have any surprises in securing an unprecedented third term as president, with the Wall Street Journal also reporting last month that he will then attend the G20 meeting in Bali in November, where a summit with Joe Biden is predicted to occur.

Should the pair meet – with US mid-term elections having just occurred – the backdrop to the American political scene may look even more combustible. An increasingly vocal group of US commentators worry about growing threats to the republic itself.

Take Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for her history of Abraham Lincoln. Last Wednesday she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that she had downplayed previous warnings about the dangers of civil war, following the January 6 attack. However, she now admits to being much more worried about the depth of political polarisation in America. She also listed out a series of parallels between today and the 1850s – a period when the United States last found itself marching towards civil war.

All told, the Chinese are going to continue to watch what Trump does very carefully…

The full article can be read here. So what else did we feature in the last issue?

On the economy, we looked at why the government felt the need to cut interest rates when the rest of the world was raising them; and we gave an update on the latest situation in Taiwan after Nancy Pelosi’s visit.

In our latest article on the ongoing Sino-US tech war over semiconductors we explained why South Korean giants like Samsung were moving to the 'American camp' after significant new chips legislation passed through Congress – and what this means for China.

We reported on the financial struggles at online grocery firms Missfresh which had listed on Nasdaq last year at a valuation of $2.8 billion (and since lost 98% of its value); and in another spectacular US stock listing we looked at the record-breaking Chinese stock that soared 300 times on its US listing (see photo of AMTD’s boss Calvin Choi ringing the stock exchange bell).

We profiled Coke’s latest challenger for cola dominance in China and asked why US fast food chicken chain Popeyes was pulling back in the Chinese market.

In our Society & Culture section we explained why a new legal drama was drawing fire from fans of US hit show The Good Wife for its similarities. And we looked at AI giant SenseTime’s push into the consumer market with an affordable chess robot targeting kids and the elderly (see photo below).

So what else have I been reading in publications besides our own??A warning: almost all of the sources (with clickable links) that I am about to highlight have paywalls…

The Financial Times carried a good analysis of the impact of a heatwave in China on the economy, specifically the shutdown of industrial production in some areas of the country because of power rationing.

The FT also carried an insightful (and deeply worrying) op-ed from Michael Auslin, a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute, about the dangers of a Taiwan conflict escalating into a full-blown nuclear war between China and America. Auslin, the author of Asia's New Geopolitics pointed out "no US leader should blithely commit to defending the island without understanding that a conflict with China could be like no other fought in history".

Also on the subject of Taiwan, the Wall Street Journal published its assessment of what a Chinese blockade of the island would mean for global business.

The South China Morning Post looked at why surveys showed South Koreans were souring on China, in spite of the nation's growing economic reliance on that vast market. It also pointed out this was particularly true of younger South Koreans.

The SCMP also looked at the new inclusions in Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index, which takes the number of constituent stocks up to 73.

Shipping website Splash247 looked at a pioneering new technological innovation introduced by a Chinese liner this month that enabled more cars to be exported to South America while bringing back pulp.

Also on the theme of shipping, the UK's The Times reported on rising tensions between India and China as a 20,000 tonne "spy ship" docked at Sri Lanka's China-leased Hambantota port. “The Yuan Wang 5 is a powerful tracking vessel whose significant aerial reach — reportedly around 750km — means that several ports in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh could be on China’s radar,” the?Indian Express?newspaper wrote.