As China sees it, the next US president will immediately be grounded in a new reality that will quickly put to rest the simplistic fallacy - mere campaign rhetoric as it probably was anyway - that the eight-year Obama administration has derelictly forfeited strong American leadership on the world stage for sheer lack of willpower or conviction. Instead, he or she will readily be forced to deal with the facts as they are: that American democracy no longer appears such a singular shining beacon guiding its own participants, let alone the rest of humanity, to practical solutions to their most vexing collective contradictions and schisms.
This polarization of American politics won't be resolved by either candidate's victory or defeat next Tuesday: it may only worsen. Already, the strongmen of Beijing and Moscow have had a field day with their own citizenry mocking (however obliquely) the sheer inability of both the American political system and media apparatus - the great pillars of freedom and prosperity - to do anything but further drive the American public apart from itself. "You want the same here?" is the operative unspoken question they're asking their own disgruntled subjects who may be harboring such subversive thoughts as the notion that they should be as free as their American counterparts to speak out and assemble.
But it would be one thing if the US representative republican system's travails were occurring in a vacuum whilst its rival Chinese bureaucratic-imperial system were not exhibiting surprising resilience and vitality: the opposite appears to be the case.
The very fact that Beijing's internal problems are more immediate, more severe, and more existentially dangerous than Washington's seems to be giving Xi Jinping and his team of central party-state administrators a big boost: knowing full well that their very survival is at stake in what amounts to a civil war within the communist apparatus, they deliberate and calibrate their every word and action with extreme care and diligence as to its potential and likely impact on every conceivable stakeholder, whether within or outside the party. Without recourse to electoral means to gauge their legitimacy even within the ruling caste, let alone the general public, they're ironically compelled to stay constantly and religiously abreast of all opinion and sentiment at every level and in every corner of the country - far more than their Western counterparts, who have the luxury of splitting their devotion between voters during election season and donors before and after.
Thus the very term "crisis" - as JFK deftly noted of the Sinic rendition of it - is the symbiosis of the constituent characters for "threat" and "opportunity", which far from being irreconcilably opposed to one another, need and feed on each other as any other yin-yang cosmic pair. It's not just that the threat gives birth to the opportunity; the opportunity itself can only live in the full apprehension of the threat it seeks to address in the first place.
And so, while China's resolution of its own internal crisis remains anything but assured, neither are its efforts doomed to fail, for these are primarily what Xi and co. finally choose to make of them. The verdict is still out on that one and will be for years yet; but in the meantime, Beijing's intolerance of dissent isn't irrational paranoia, let alone a sadistic exercise of power for power's sake - it's a dispassionate calculation that the only path forward is to buy more time for the existing order so that it can eventually deliver enough general welfare to defuse the ticking bomb of social conflict and upheaval. Even the regime's most scathing critics have a hard time disagreeing with it on at least one point: things surely won't get better in the near term were it to implode and collapse.
And this is where the rise of Donald Trump, irrespective of what happens November 8, has already made the communist Chinese regime such a big winner in this US election cycle. For Beijing knows quite intimately the underlying structural imbalance at the heart of the West's malaise - because it's dealing with the more virulent Chinese version of it itself.
Namely, this is the creation in the past two decades of a permanent administrative-managerial "overclass" of intertwined big government and big business interests, whose stranglehold on the global financial and trade systems in particular has increasingly removed important economic decision-making processes from popular sovereignty even in democratic countries. China has of course benefited most handsomely among the family of nations from this Western-led neoliberal hegemony of the post-Cold War era (circa 1990-2014); it has unsurprisingly also been worst afflicted by its sheer excesses (having taken in, needless to say, the bad along with the good).
Xi Jinping and his party-state leadership clique have already been waging the political struggle that Western populists like Mr. Trump have essentially been promising to launch in their own far richer societies: a redistribution of the modes of wealth production and wealth transfer from the small rentier-official elite that enjoys it to the masses whose toil (and debt) it's actually extracted from. Tellingly, what makes Trump so disconcerting to the American and Western money and power elite is not any particular policy proposal - not only do they know these to be fluid and negotiable, but they're also privately comfortable with one of their own (as Xi is no doubt privately affable with many a corrupt party apparatchik who ingratiate him with secret entreaties or gifts) - but the apparent authenticity of his suggestion that it's time for Main Street to call the shots on the economy again, not Wall Street and K Street.
Trump is thus sending the American ruling class the same message that Xi has been sending the Chinese with gutso and violence as needed: "Look, you've had a really good run, and you can still have a really good run yet, but you'd better start paying more dues to 'the people' now, or else you'll force my hand to act more ruthlessly on their behalf at your visible expense."
Though in Trump's case, the gutter-depths of such disdainful threats seems to be reserved for the "soft power" ambassadors of the ruling elite more so than its "hard power" practitioners: he despises the liberal mainstream media which he sees as peddlers of an unbridled liberal universalism that promotes unchecked immigration (open borders) and the effacement of national (read: ethnic and racial) identity. In this he also mimics Xi - in a far more benign manner, of course: the communist secretary-general has vehemently extirpated Western "universal values" from public discourse as a soft but insidious form of cultural imperialism by China-haters bent on humiliating Han pride and consciousness.
Trump will still probably lose the election, but already he has so radically altered the political landscape of American politics that it's becoming conceivable that the Republican party is only beginning to be transformed in the flamboyant billionaire's image. This will have enormous repercussions for the evolving future role that America plays in the world - especially if the Democrats fail to adapt to the shifting electoral dynamics across much of the country, which is seeing them decisively lose the white working-class vote in their former strongholds of the labor-union era. For China, the ideological coup of Trumpism - with or without Trump himself in the White House - will be enormous: it will be a powerful (if still limited) validation of the regime's longstanding claims that America and the American people are at heart no less narrowly minded and parochial in their sectarian interests as any other nation. And it will accelerate the drift of China's neighbors into Beijing's orbit, not just the already irresistible economic one but increasingly the sociopolitical and ultimately the underlying cultural one as well.
So is Hillary Clinton all that stands in the way of such an unmitigated US setback in the Asia-Pacific? Probably wishful thinking, given how narrow a victory she's now likely to win. Even leaving aside the renewed FBI investigation into her emails and potential federal probe of the family charity foundation, if Mrs. Clinton wants to avoid the fate of the Obama administration at the hands of powerful GOP opposition in Congress and state governments, she may well have to compromise on immigration (i.e. amnesty for undocumented workers) just as she already has on trade (backtracking her support for TPP in the face of Bernie Sanders' powerful anti-globalization challenge from the left during the Democratic primary). Similarly, on foreign policy she'll have to choose between restoring American credibility against hard physical security threats - a course that would require less haggling of strongmen "allies" like Turkey's Erdogan and the Philippines' Duterte over their human rights abuses - and the alternative of finding America increasingly isolated with the Brexit-wrangling British Anglosphere and the sclerotic EU in censuring non-Western countries for their disrespect of progressive values.
In fact, objectively it's easy to see why a nationalist China prefers Hillary to Trump for practical reasons just as it prefers Trump to Hillary for ideological ones. Trump, not Hillary, is the candidate already better in tune (at least publicly) with the new realities of an increasingly Sinocentric Asia-Pacific (where even the west coast of North America is arguably coming within a nascent Chinese economic sphere of influence); as such, he's the one more likely to put America in the driver's seat of the US-China relationship as it's truly evolving, whilst Hillary will default to positions that no longer adequately reflect what's already fundamentally shifted. Where both are in fact likely to arrive at very similar bargains and compromises, Trump will more easily do so in a way that makes it look like America "wins" (because he's basically saying that it's "losing" to start with), but Hillary's likely to do so in a way that betrays an appearance of even further American decline (because she's comparatively arguing that it's still "winning" right now).
Either way, China's the real winner of Tuesday's decision: regardless of who actually gets 270 electoral votes, it will either be a status quo candidate who can no longer contain its rise or a challenger candidate who has acknowledged that its rise is already the only plausible starting point for US policy.
