Chinese social media abuzz with Biden's election triumph
Nov 08, 2020
Hong Kong [China], November 9 : News about the victory of Joe Biden in the recent US presidential elections, saw China's tightly controlled social media platforms buzzing.
As of Sunday afternoon, posts about Biden on the Twitter-equivalent micro-blogging site Weibo had attracted over 730 million views, while Tencent's WeChat Moments, which resembles Facebook's Timeline, was equally busy, reported Tracy Qu for the South China Morning Post.
"Everyone cares about the US election so much, but I don't even know who is the mayor of Shanghai," one Weibo user said.
Several comments on the platform were about the possibility of Donald Trump refusing to leave the White House.
"When [Biden] enters the White House next January, he will face a series of unprecedented challenges: how to carry Trump out of the White House," said another Weibo user.
Chinese state media have also hosted Weibo topics, many of them focused on the potential post-election uncertainty in the US, reported SCMP.
One hosted by Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily and titled "The emotions of US voters are heavily divided" had received more than 81 million views by Sunday afternoon.
"This is the democratic 'troubleshooting' mechanism. Once you find that the train is on the wrong track, you can change the driver," said Zhang Dingding, an internet industry commentator, on WeChat about Biden's win.
Qu wrote that despite a lot of praise for Biden in the communist nation, many others urged people to exercise caution before jumping to a decision about the new American leader.
Mei Xinyu, a researcher at China's commerce ministry, said on WeChat: "It is a victory for Biden, not a victory for China. From a long-term perspective, it is possible that it even won't be a victory for the US ... Calm down, observe, and think."
Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, defeated Trump in a closely contested election and will be the 46th president of the United States. At the age of 78, he is the oldest person to be elected President in the history of the US.
In his third attempt at the White House, Biden, a four-decade Washington figure as a Senator and then a vice president, received more than 74 million votes, 4 million more than Trump, and more than any other presidential candidate.
Moments after Biden was projected to be the winner of the US presidential elections, Trump refused to concede defeat, saying that the election was "far from over", and promised legal challenges by his re-election campaign.
