As France heads to the polls this weekend, many around the world will be rooting for their preferred candidate to deliver a victory speech.
Even without the right to vote, it’s hard not to feel invested in global ballot initiatives these days. Whether it’s an event like the French election or Brexit, another country’s behavior at the ballot box can have ripple effects across the globe.
Perhaps no recent event had larger consequences for the rest of the world, however, than the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And in that case, the world didn’t get its way. Had that vote been global, about 60 percent of people would have backed Hillary Clinton, according to a U.S. News survey.
That’s not to say Donald Trump didn’t enjoy tremendous support in certain countries. In Russia, about 83 percent of people supported the real estate mogul and former reality TV star, and in China, 54 percent of people did so.
Why did more than half of people in Russia and China back the Republican candidate? It’s difficult to know for sure. Below, a few experts weigh in.
Russia
Many Russians supported Trump because they thought his leadership would improve U.S.-Russian relations, says Ivan Kurilla, a history professor who studies the relationship between the two countries at the European University at St. Petersburg.
At one point during the U.S. presidential campaign, Russia propaganda had stirred up so much fear that some people “sincerely believed there could be a war between the countries,” Kurilla says.
Clinton was seen as a hawk, and as a candidate who would keep in place the sanctions imposed by former President Barack Obama after Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimea.
“Nobody thought foreign policy toward Russia would change with Hillary Clinton,” he says. “They were probably thinking that Trump would eliminate all the sanctions.”
Even some in the liberal Russian intelligentsia were pushing for a Trump victory, Kurilla says. During the Obama years, Russian President Vladimir Putin associated Russian intellectuals with U.S. interests, and used that as an excuse to clamp down on them and the rest of civil society.
With Trump in office, some believed Russia’s domestic politics wouldn’t be as “punishing and illiberal as it is now,” Kurilla says.
Other Russians, he says, were simply irked by some of Clinton’s comments about Putin. As a senator in 2008, for example, she joked about former President George W. Bush’s comment about seeing “Putin’s soul,” saying as a KGB agent, by definition Putin didn’t have one.
China
Trump’s tough talk about China, including calling the country “a currency manipulator,” didn’t initially get him off on the right foot with the Chinese people, says Michel Hockx, director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies at University of Notre Dame.
But opinions of Trump started to change after a video of his granddaughter reciting a Chinese poem went viral.
Trump may also have benefited from Clinton’s relative lack of popularity, Hockx argues. “The Clintons have a bad history when it comes to China,” he wrote in an email. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton was in power when the U.S. bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999. And while the U.S. claimed the move was an accident, the Chinese widely believe it was intentional, he says.
Hillary Clinton’s human rights activism also rubbed the Chinese the wrong way, Hockx says. As secretary of state, she drew much attention for intervening on behalf of the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, helping him out of the country after he had sought refuge in the U.S. Embassy.
“Compared to this, Trump was probably seen by many (and rightly so) as less interventionist and more focused on trade and maintaining good relations,” Hockx writes.
Some Chinese perceived Hillary to be more hawkish, and more likely to raise tensions between China and the U.S. over issues like the South China Sea, says Mary Gallagher, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan.
Some Chinese, particularly young nationalists, were even flattered by comments Trump made about China beating the U.S., Gallagher says.
“They liked the way China talked about the campaign,” she says. “It played into this idea that China was a rising power and is becoming stronger than the U.S.”
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Why Russians, Chinese Backed Trump in the U.S. Presidential Election originally appeared on usnews.com
