US election: A gift for Chinese propaganda

No matter who triumphs on Tuesday, the US election has been a big win for China’s national propaganda machine, which has gleefully catalogued the seemingly endless parade of skeletons marching out of America’s political closet.

For decades Beijing has disparaged US democracy, calling into question the most basic building blocks of the state, from competitive elections to freedom of the press.

Ahead of this year’s election, Chinese journalists received instructions to write stories making American politics look bad, according to sources familiar with the orders. As the primaries began, one reporter at a major state-run media organisation, who spoke to AFP on the condition of anonymity, worried he would have a hard time finding sufficiently damning material.

His doubts were unjustified. Even America’s fiercest defenders agree the contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton has shown democracy at its ugliest. And China’s media have happily joined in.

“The innumerable scandals, rumours, conspiracy theories and obscenities make it impossible for a person to look away,” the official Xinhua news service wrote in a commentary last week, likening the 2016 election to a train wreck.

A commentary in the online edition of the Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily said the circus-like debate series between the two candidates “clearly shows the decline” of the US political system.

But it did not need to make the argument itself; it simply used a long list of quotes from prominent American media outlets across the political spectrum: “tacky”, “ugly”, “ear-splitting”.

“No matter who gets the job, the memory of the presidential election will live on,” the nationalistic Global Times, which has close ties to the party, wrote with relish on Thursday.

Beijing has long aimed its propaganda barrels at the US, but the government has stepped up its anti-Western commentary under President Xi Jinping.

A leaked political memo from 2013, known as Document Number 9, listed “Western constitutional democracy” and its values, including media independence, as top threats to the Chinese Communist Party’s rule.

Chinese cadres subsequently mounted a campaign denouncing the influence of so-called “hostile foreign forces” on a wide cross-section of society, from universities to newspapers, criticising the ideological agenda being pushed by the US as hypocritical and dangerous.

But China’s propaganda bosses are unlikely ever to have imagined that a United States presidential candidate would be doing their work for them.