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President Trump’s explosive allegations against China on Thursday night have left the Chinese Communist Party and its American enablers scrambling for excuses.
Speaking from the White House, POTUS accused China of committing the largest compromise of election data in history. He said Beijing had illicitly obtained information from roughly 220 million American voter files during the 2020 election cycle.
The Chinese Communist Party responded with its usual straight faced denial while longtime China watchers in Washington wondered aloud how Trump could possibly maintain any relationship with Xi Jinping after laying out the facts.
“China has all along adhered to the principle of non interference in others’ internal affairs,” Chinese Embassy spokesman Liu Chang said in a statement. “The U.S. election is an internal matter of the U.S. Its outcome is determined by the votes of the American people. China has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the U.S.”
The fresh accusations have raised questions about a possible summit between Trump and Xi later this year.
Longtime observers of China immediately began asking how Trump’s stated desire for a working relationship with Xi could survive evidence that Beijing had swiped a massive trove of American voter information.
Bill Bishop, publisher of the Sinocism newsletter, wondered how anyone could still pretend everything was normal. “So how can he still be friends with Xi after what he says the PRC just did in stealing 220m voter files?” Bishop wrote on X.
“If any of these allegations are true how can this not be a rupture?”China hawk Gordon Chang, author of “Plan Red” and “China Is Going To War”, said Beijing’s leaders were almost certainly rattled by Trump’s decision to make the intelligence public.
“China’s leaders are almost certainly in a panic right about now,” Chang wrote. “Bravo, President Trump, for revealing China’s massive interference in our elections and in our society.”“Trump just showed China who’s boss.”
Not everyone was impressed. Senator Mark Warner, the Democrat vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, brushed the whole thing off by noting that voter registration data has long been available for purchase. “The idea that somehow these countries are gathering voter files, these are publicly available. You don’t have to hack into them. You can buy them,” Warner told CBS News.
Trump’s claims go beyond the limited assessments released during his first term. A January 2021 intelligence community review said China probably kept up its usual efforts to collect information on American voters and public opinion. A later partially declassified report found that Chinese intelligence had analyzed voter registration data from multiple states.
Neither assessment accused China of changing vote totals or hacking election systems.Just one day before Trump spoke, a Pew Research Center survey found that China is now viewed more favorably than the United States in 25 of the 36 countries polled. It marked the first time in two decades of Pew polling that Beijing had overtaken Washington in a majority of nations surveyed. Researchers blamed the shift on China’s growing influence and fading global respect for the United States.
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