The fallout from Friday’s heated Oval Office meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and today’s announcement that the U.S. would pause aid to Ukraine continues to reverberate around the world. In China, netizens closely followed the events and reflected upon the role of diplomacy in the world’s rapidly shifting geopolitical alignments. On Monday, the U.S. Embassy in China’s official WeChat account shared a press release about the meeting, during which Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance had berated Zelenskyy over what they claimed was his lack of gratitude for American support. (Zelenskyy has thanked American leaders dozens of times for this support.) The U.S. Embassy account was flooded with more than 7,000 comments from Chinese WeChat users, most of them overwhelmingly critical of the Trump administration’s treatment of Zelenskyy and Ukraine, as CDT Chinese editors documented. Moreover, since the U.S. Embassy WeChat account enables comment filtering—meaning that comments must be reviewed and approved by the account’s administrator before being publicly displayed—some WeChat users joked that the U.S. Embassy in China was “setting a positive example by aligning itself with the forces of justice”:
日月: A shameful day for America.
顾: A day that disgraced the Statue of Liberty.
岭南黎庶: Trump and Vance made fools of themselves.
V: In just 20 minutes, two numbskulls managed to destroy the image that the U.S. has carefully cultivated for over two centuries.
大海: The supporters of the invasion are worse than the invaders themselves!
陈自强: Cheaters! By bullying a small country under the guise of wanting peace, America has abandoned its own values.
江风: No matter what, he is still the president of a country, and you drove him away. Don’t you have any respect for his country or his people? [Chinese]
WeChat public account 兔子兔子画漫画 (Tùzi tùzi huà mànhuà, “Rabbit Rabbit draws comics”) posted on Tuesday about how, amid the U.S. government’s increasingly aggressive posture towards Ukraine and softening tone towards Russia, it was “heartwarming” to see such a swift pushback of critical comments under the U.S. Embassy’s post:
These comments gave me the sense that deep down, many of my compatriots still possess a normal sense of right and wrong. We can infer that the commenters all subscribe to the embassy’s official account, which means that at least they closely follow the trajectory of a country that has served as a “beacon” to so many. And when it comes to fundamental questions of right and wrong, they haven’t lost their sense of judgment and have maintained a healthy conscience.
These comments made me realize how many of my compatriots are in sync with mainstream global civilization and values. Opposing aggression and tyranny is one of the most fundamental values of humankind, and there’s nothing uniquely “Chinese” about this. The way they have expressed their opinions fills me with pride and brings some warmth and comfort to this cold world. [Chinese]
Viewing these current events through a historical lens, WeChat blogger Zhang Ming wrote about how the “bullying” of Zelenskyy is emblematic of an old, immoral tradition of statecraft that people today should not tolerate:
I used to think that after World War II, the “law of the jungle” in international politics had faded into history, and that the era of big countries arbitrarily deciding the fate of small countries—as they did in the [1938] Munich Agreement—was a thing of the past. I never thought that a mere change of administration in the U.S. would upend everything.
History may repeat itself, but as people who understand history, we must not consent to playing the same pitiful roles we once did. We must remember that if there is no morality or justice in this world, then life becomes meaningless, and the living are but the walking dead. Such an existence is not worth pursuing, and ordinary people should not be expected to tolerate it. [Chinese]
Chinese commentators also reflected on the merits of diplomacy in their reactions to the Trump-Zelenskyy meeting. On Sunday, popular-science and current-events writer Xiang Dongliang criticized the belief that strong countries can discard diplomacy and bully the weak in order to get their way, and called this an outdated and short-sighted argument that is harmful to both the U.S. and China’s development. In The East is Read newsletter last month, Zichen Wang highlighted a 2009 essay on Ukraine, Europe, and the importance of diplomacy from prominent Chinese social scientist Shiping Tang, who wrote that “the art of diplomacy is not to search for the emotionally gratifying, but the rationally possible, within geographic constraints.” And a China Daily editorial on Sunday described the Trump-Zelenskyy meeting as such: “As diplomacy, the spectacle was unseemly. But as reality television, it offered a gripping and revealing glimpse into the realpolitik of the Trump administration.”
Another article, from WeChat public account 码头青年 (mǎtou qīngnián, “port youth”) reflected last week on three years of war between Russia and Ukraine, noting that Trump’s withholding of support to Ukraine has put the latter’s future in jeopardy. The author wrote, “Historically, the moment the U.S. withdraws is often the most dangerous moment for its allies. […] Will 2025 be the year Ukraine is ‘abandoned?’ […] Three years later, we find that what has changed is not the nature of the war, but people’s patience with the war.” Writing for the Carter Center’s US-China Perception Monitor last month, Chinese columnist KS Liu asked, “Is Trump Selling Out Ukraine?”
Other commentaries were more direct. Former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post Wang Xiangwei wrote over the weekend that the “extraordinary shouting match” in the Oval Office “provides another sharp insight into the American psyche and its naked hegemonic thinking.” A commentary last week in the People’s Daily Online was headlined, “The West’s profit-driven playbook resurfaces in Ukraine,” and it argued that American efforts to extract mineral resources from Ukraine “[resemble] the Scramble for Africa from the late 19th to the early 20th century. […] History seems to repeat itself, though the plunderers change.” And an article in Nanfang Daily on Saturday concluded, “Trump’s actions are not about creating peace or helping Ukraine, but about reaping greater benefits.”