As the US reels from the Trump assassination attempt, China sees weakness

Saturday's attack once again fed common narratives held in China about the US, including the idea that it's a massive, chaotic "Gotham City."

• The assassination attempt on Trump has shocked China as well, exploding in virality on social media.
• But it's also fed common narratives in China about the US, like the idea that it's a "Gotham City." 
• The attack on Saturday has resurfaced usual criticisms of gun violence and political infighting.

A gunman's assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump has flung the US back into the spotlight in China.

The deadly shooting on Saturday, which killed one spectator at Trump's Pennsylvania rally and left the former president's ear bleeding, has dominated discussions on Weibo, China's version of X.

Within one day, topics covering the shooting itself, Trump's response, and viral photos of the Republican nominee's fist-pump have received over 1.7 billion total views on Weibo, per data seen by Business Insider.

Many reactions closely mirrored the mood on international social-media platforms like X, with users expressing shock and rushing to decipher the details of the attack.

Yet for the Chinese internet, a prevailing outcome of the shooting has been that it confirms a widely held bias of the US being poorly run and prone to internal strife because of its political system.

Gun violence and a narrative of chaos

Gun access, one of the usual suspects in Chinese criticism toward the US, reemerged at the fore of discussion on Sunday. The FBI says the 20-year-old rally shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, used a legally purchased 5.56mm AR-style rifle to attack Trump.

"Free America, a shooting every day," wrote one user. Theirs was the most-liked comment on the state media's report on the shooting.

"But why won't you ban guns?" another user wrote.

"Because the Americans have heard too many gunshots, so they are immune to them," one person wrote when a blogger discussed the crowd's reaction to the shooting.

It's a narrative that's been propagated for years in China: The idea that the US, with its protests, urban crime rates, and gun violence, is an incessantly chaotic and dangerous place to live in. Some have taken to routinely referring to the US as a massive "Gotham City."

Beijing, meanwhile, has been building China's image as a country with low crime and close to no gun violence.

"It feeds into the broader, persistent narrative that China is a far 'safer' and more orderly country compared to the United States," Dylan Loh, an assistant professor of politics and social science at the National University of Singapore, told BI.

"It is true that such public gun-related violence is almost unheard of in China," Loh added.

Democracy is seen as too messy

The same sentiment appeared in The Global Times, a tabloid often considered a mouthpiece for the ruling government. One Chinese professor told the outlet that the attack on Trump showed the"ongoing rampant gun violence issue in the US."

"This indicates that political violence has been a persistent element in American history," Diao Daming, a professor at the Renmin University of China in Beijing, told the outlet.

That's another criticism often levied by China against the US and liberal democracy as a whole. People there frequently opine that the US two-party election system is messy, hinders real progress, and creates needless infighting.

"The only way for Biden to defeat Trump is to assassinate him, and the only way for us to defeat the United States is to hope that the United States starts a civil war," one blogger wrote on Sunday.

"The US election is more entertaining than all the entertainment variety shows and film art in the world," another wrote.

China's one-party system typically changes its paramount leader every 10 years, though Xi Jinping has governed for 12 and has removed limits on his time in the nation's highest office.

'Comrade Nation Builder'

Memes of Trump's survival have also surfaced, with users cheering how "Comrade Nation Builder" was escorted away with just a bleeding ear.

A sarcastic nickname for the former president that surged in popularity after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, it's used to lampoon Trump as a man secretly working for China to undermine the US.

"This photo of Trump is too good. The photographer deserves a bonus! Comrade Nation Builder has made such great sacrifices," wrote a beauty blogger.

Some have also photoshopped a Chinese flag behind Trump as he raised his fist in defiance.

"Even though the bullet struck my ear, I can still hear the voice of the Party!" one blogger wrote jokingly in a caption.

China's central government, for its part, has said little officially about the attack. Xi, meanwhile, joined world leaders in expressing sympathy to Trump.

To be sure, the attack on Trump has been widely criticized in the US as a failure of the Secret Service, with experts questioning how a gunman was able to reach a vantage point with a weapon so close to the former president's location.

Top leaders on both sides of the aisle have also asked for calm, calling for political rhetoric to tone down.

"Obviously, we can't go on like this as a society," House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Sunday.