US-China relations in post-Obama era

She is relatively known and predictable, and he is less known and less predictable. But what will a President Hillary Clinton or a President Donald Trump mean to US-China relations? Experts in the field weigh in with their views, Chen Weihua reports in Washington.

Ona Saturday morning in late October, Washington-based Chinese journalist Luo Shi was kayaking on the Potomac River near the Chain Bridge when one of his friends in China sent him a message on the popular social communication platform WeChat: Which US presidential candidate, Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton, is better for China?

The journalist, who prefers to be identified as Luo Shi, said he spent some 20 minutes going back and forth with his friend, a businessman, on the topic while floating on the river.

"My friend was worried if the already tense China-US relations will get worse under either Clinton or Trump since there have been so many conflicting news reports in the Chinese news media and social media," Luo said.

A Pew Center survey released on Oct 5 shows that more Chinese saw Clinton favorably (37 percent) than Trump (22 percent). And 35 percent of the Chinese saw Clinton unfavorably while 40 percent had an unfavorable view of Trump.

That was a huge difference compared with a poll in May by the Chinese language Phoenix TV website. It showed that of 24,449 people surveyed, 61.5 percent supported Trump while only 7.8 percent favored Clinton. Polls by some other Chinese news media outlets at the time also revealed a high favorability rating for Trump.

Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, described those polls in China as not scientifically based. "My view and my observation is that China is divided very much like us," said Li, a US citizen.

Interest in the US election among the Chinese has been high. Luo showed last weekend that his WeChat Moments where his friends, mostly well-educated young people, tweeted articles and photos about Clinton's renewed email probe, Trump's image in a Halloween parade and an article by Robert Kennedy's speechwriter Adam Walinsky, arguing why he, a lifelong Democrat, will vote for Trump. All the articles were in Chinese or were translated into Chinese.