President Xi Jinping chose the right words when he congratulated Donald Trump on his election as the 47th president of the United States by urging both sides “to find the right way to get along in the new era, so as to benefit both countries and the wider world.”
Xi’s choice of words was sober, practical and, last but not least, realistic, namely in comparison with some of the effusive congratulations by other heads of state or government, such as UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s “hearty” congratulations in a gushing phone call, an obvious attempt to smooth over some of his party members’ rather vocal support for Kamala Harris.
In his pragmatic congratulatory message, Xi also said that “history teaches that China and the United States gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation,” noting that “a stable, sound and sustainable China-US relationship serves the two countries’ shared interests and meets the aspirations of the international community.”
Xi also “expressed the hope that the two sides will uphold the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation, strengthen dialogue and communication, properly manage differences and expand mutually beneficial cooperation”.
The wording of Xi’s message to Trump is a classic example of diplomatic realism, i.e., the understanding that the right way of improving both bilateral and multilateral relations is to pursue pragmatic policies – instead of value-driven policies that tend to be confrontational, paradoxical and, in extremis, result in perilous lose-lose situations. Realpolitik is the right way forward.
Trump’s astonishingly clear election victory has given the lie to Western pollsters and media outlets’ pre-election claim that he and Harris were in a very tight race, apart from the fact that most media in the US and the EU were unashamedly biased in favour of Harris. Wishful thinking resulted in reality denial by journalists, polling organisations and commentators. Nothing in politics is worse than losing one’s sense of reality. Facts, not speculation and conjecture, should drive politics to ensure their success.
No doubt, Trump’s election victory is one of the greatest political comebacks in history. In his congratulatory message, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated Trump “on history’s greatest comeback”.
As of yesterday, Trump had garnered 312 seats in the Electoral College, versus Harris’s 226 seats. A total of 270 seats would have sufficed to win the election.
Moreover, as of yesterday, Trump had won 50.5 percent of the popular vote, as against Harris’s 48.0 percent, or 74.7 million votes and 70.9 million votes respectively.
Adding insult to injury, Trump won all swing states, including Arizona, resulting in a completely clean sweep of the seven battleground states.
And that’s not all – the Republicans won control of the Senate by gaining four seats, now holding four more seats, 54 in total, than needed for a majority in the upper chamber. The Democrats lost four seats and are down to 46.
In the House of Representatives, as of yesterday, the Republicans had won 213 seats, just five seats short of gaining the majority. The Democrats lost two seats, ending up with 202. US media reported over the weekend that the Republicans were projected to gain the House majority as well. If so, this would result in what is known in the US as “unified government,” i.e., a party controlling the White House and the two chambers of parliament, which has happened quite a few times that the current two-party system has been in force since the 19th century. In other words, it’s actually a systemic phenomenon.
As US-based BBC correspondent Anthony Zurcher has pointed out, the overwhelming election victory of both Trump and his party has turned the Democrats’ so-called “liberal voting coalition” to dust.
The Biden-Harris administration should blame itself for all the dust. Electoral successes of incoming governments in Western-style democracies are commonly due to the failures of their outgoing counterparts. That’s, for instance, the case not just in the US but also in a number of EU states where ultra-rightwing parties’ successes such as Vox in Spain, AfD in Germany and Chega in Portugal are the result of the failures of so-called mainstream parties failing to heed the worries of the general population about bread-and-butter issues.
In last Tuesday’s US elections, many voters cast their ballots AGAINST a raft of situations that they perceive as grievances besetting their private lives such as the Democrats’ failure to put the lid on illegal immigration, put the brakes on the rising cost of living, clamp down on crime and rein in the extreme manifestations of wokism and gender politics.
My impression is that many voted FOR Trump only because they were AGAINST Harris as, for them, she represented all the perceived misdeeds associated with Biden.
It was also engrossing to see that Harris’s overwhelming support by the influential entertainment industry, such as famous actors, TV hosts and musicians, failed to spark, such as Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey and Harrison Ford. I presume that working people struggling to make ends meet, paying their mortgages and bearing the prohibitive cost of their kids’ university education were unimpressed by the appearances of overpaid celebrities’ pro-Harris views.
It’s a sociologically amazing fact that a billionaire mogul like Trump has been able to attract the vote of the working-class electorate to such a large extent. Scientists should launch in-depth studies on this phenomenon.
Another riveting aspect of Trump’s victory is that the reportedly nearly 100 criminal charges – alleged election interference, civil cases, the alleged mishandling of classified documents, sexual misconduct, etc. – have not prevented him from winning the votes of over half of the US electorate.
I am not surprised, considering the high degree of the West’s judicialisation of politics and/or judicial politisation, in the US in particular, based on its mushrooming and highly politicised litigation industry.
Political scientists have warned against the judicialisation of politics, i.e., the reliance on courts and judicial means to rule on imminently political issues such as trade, education, immigration and environment protection. The transfer to courts of contentious political issues has become a bad habit that could mark the transition to what some commentators have termed “juristocracy”.
As it may be, the world has to deal with the fact that Trump will be moving back into the White House for the next four years. One can only hope that the 78-year-old business magnate and politician’s second stint at the helm of the world’s “uberstate” will be less topsy-turvy than his first one between 2017 and 2021, both on the domestic and international front.
Unlike what many non-US analysts seem to be believe, I do not think that, normally, foreign policy issues do matter much in American elections, unless when the US is directly involved in a war overseas, such as Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and American soldiers get killed and wounded there. Both the Gaza-Israel and Ukraine-Russia conflicts only played second fiddle this time, for the simple reason that the US has no boots on the ground there. Pro-Palestinian protesters are a noisy but tiny minority in the US. Most Americans, first and foremost, defend Israel’s right to self-defence.
Neither did China feature prominently in the election campaign, apart from Trump’s run-of-the mill threats to raise tariffs on goods imported from China to “protect American industry”. The crux of the problem is that higher customs duties on inexpensive merchandise from China would primarily hurt Trump voters’ wallets. A new trade war is the last thing that the world needs right now. Regrettably, Biden and Harris never distanced themselves from Trump’s anti-China tariff moves during his first term in the White House, and Biden this year even raised some of them.
A wise head of state ought to protect the interests of both their country’s consumers and manufacturers, employees and employers, importers and exporters – no easy task, for sure, but that’s what politics is all about – striking the right balance between conflicting interests and working out compromises, both at home and with one’s counterparts abroad.
I hope that Elon Musk, who heartily supported Trump’s hustings, will be able to steer him in the right direction as far as China-US business ties are concerned. Musk has first-hand investment experience in China, and he is the right person to advise Trump on a realistic approach towards getting relations between Beijing and Washington back on an even keel.
The China-US relationship is the world’s most crucial. The whole world will suffer if it veers further off course. Dialogue, debate and discussion are the right way to tackle the admittedly not always easy relations between the world’s number one and number two economies.
As President Xi said in his congratulatory message, and I do repeat it because of its uttermost importance to the international community, China and the US need to “find the right way to get along in the new era, so as to benefit both countries and the wider world”.
Workable China-US political and economic relations would also set a good example for the European Union – Washington’s junior partner – which, alas, has copy-pasted Biden’s policy of imposing rather steep tariffs on electric cars from China – a measure that hurts both its cash-strapped consumers and its much-vaunted efforts to protect the environment.
I also hope that Trump’s future secretary of state will lower the temperature on the Taiwan question, which is prone to torpedo China-US ties if handled carelessly.
Last but not least, Macau will hardly be impacted by Trump’s return to the White House. US tourists accounted for just 0.4 percent of Macau’s visitor arrivals in the first three quarters of this year, when shipments to the US made up a mere 2.3 percent of Macau’s exports, while goods from the US accounted for 6.2 percent of Macau’s imports, according to the Statistics and Census Bureau (DSEC). US investment in Macau is substantial but concentrated on the gaming and hospitality industries.
Trump visited Hong Kong and Macau several times in the 1980s and 90s, reportedly even planning to build a Trump Tower in Hong Kong. Apparently, he was also involved in one of the nearly two dozen bids for Macau’s then three gaming concessions in 2001. Local government officials told me at that time that they regarded Trump as a property developer rather than a casino tycoon. Thus, his bid fizzled out.
Perhaps, Macau’s three US gaming operators – Sands, Wynn and MGM – can do their bit to promote the development of mutually beneficial ties between China and the US through the political clout that their headquarters back home may have.
I am cautiously optimistic that China-US relations with Trump back in the White House will be an improvement from his first term. As a step in the right direction, Trump wrote in a social media post on Saturday that his former team members Mike Pompeo (ex-secretary of state) and Nikki Haley (former US ambassador the UN) – both notorious China hawks – will not join his administration. Glad tidings less than a week after his election victory.
– Harald Brüning
