Chinese Centrist Liberal Critics of Trump: A Reconsideration of Contemporary Chinese Liberalism

This article challenges the existing scholarship’s characterisation of Chinese liberal intellectuals as Trumpian intellectuals. By conducting a close reading of Chinese academic publications, lectures and opinions aired on social media, this article finds that besides Trump’s Chinese liberal fans, many leading Chinese liberal intellectuals harshly criticised Trump. However, they do not align themselves with American liberals in making all-out partisan criticisms of Trump and American right-wing politics. Instead, their criticisms are mostly centrist. This article argues that Chinese liberal intellectuals’ centrist criticisms of Trump reflect their Confucian, egalitarian and moderate nationalist sympathies, dimensions of their thoughts which have been ignored by existing scholarship regarding them. By exploring Chinese centrist liberal critics of Trump, this article brings to light the ideological heterogeneity within the Chinese liberal camp previously lumped together under the umbrella of “anti-authoritarianism.”