Banner: A man reads Chinese social media on his phone in the aftermath of the Trump shooting, July 13, 2024. (Source: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect)

In the immediate aftermath of July 2024 assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, a range of narratives about the event emerged from China’s propaganda ecosystem, ranging from disinformation and conspiracy theories to more anodyne official statements. The narratives provide a window into the Chinese Communist Party’s thinking regarding the country’s strategic positioning in relation to the United States: striking a balance between fact-based news and anti-US narratives, maintaining flexibility to maneuver official policy, and presenting itself as the more desirable alternative to US influence in the Indo-Pacific and around the world.

Narratives from state media highlighted perennial themes in Chinese coverage of US affairs that portray America in an unflattering light. These include the notion that America is a dangerous place plagued by gun violence; that American democracy is currently in chaos; and that democracy as a political system is prone to instability and eventual breakdown. On domestic Chinese social media, meanwhile, a story of a resurgent Trump emerged.

Overall, China did not deviate from this playbook. Official state media tended to stick to the facts, but framed from a PRC perspective, while pro-PRC accounts on global social media exploited events to amplify divisive narratives. On Chinese domestic platforms, content moderators attempted to strike a balance between censoring potentially incendiary content while amplifying stories that juxtapose the disorder of the American system to the stability of the Chinese state.

Notably, these narratives aligned with previous DFRLab analysis of Chinese propaganda meta-trends, including depictions of the United States as an unworthy global leader; presenting China as an orderly and rules-based polity in comparison; and framing democracy as an unreliable system of governance that brings disorder and chaos to society.

Official statements and state-controlled media largely stuck to fact-based statements of events as they unfolded. For example, Xinhua primarily issued short updates on the incident, focusing on the unfolding events without propagating a particular narrative spin. Similarly, People’s Daily, which primarily reposted Xinhua articles, provided factual updates like China’s official statement on the assassination attempt and details about Trump’s injuries. Meanwhile, China Daily offered a range of opinion pieces highlighting the intense polarization in American politics, such as how the attack on Trump will reshape the election race or how it mirrors the rampant gun violence crisis in the United States.

China Daily’s articles in particular fit into the broader themes commonly seen in Chinese narratives about the United States. They emphasized America’s internal chaos and instability, reinforcing the portrayal of the US as a dangerous place plagued by gun violence and deep political divisions. This approach aligns with meta-trends in Chinese propaganda that depict the United States as an unworthy global leader while contrasting it with China’s image as an orderly and stable polity.

By maintaining a factual tone, state-controlled media outlets project an image of neutrality and credibility while subtly reinforcing negative perceptions of the United States. This dual strategy helps the Chinese government manage public opinion both domestically and internationally.

Other more nationalistically-inclined outlets, including the Global Times, were more explicit in laying out these anti-US themes, featuring articles with titles such as “Vigilance needed over spillover effects of polarized, extreme US politics,” “US political violence, polarization form vicious cycle,” and “Rising political violence indicates a profound pathological symptom in American democracy.”

About an hour after the shooting, the first hashtags related to the event began trending on the domestic Chinese platform Weibo. On July 14 and 15, government accounts on Weibo amplified hundreds of posts, most of which focused on breaking news updates from US-based news outlets and statements from US law enforcement. Official statements describing how Xi Jinping’s expressed his sympathies to Trump also received heavy promotion on the platform.

The first hashtag that trended on the Weibo leaderboards was #枪声响起特朗普撤离演讲台# (“Gunshots rang out and Trump evacuated the podium”). As the news developed, this hashtag suddenly dropped from the leaderboards, replaced by another hashtag, #特朗普遭遇枪击# (“Trump was shot”). This apparent swapping of hashtags could be the result of the content moderator of both hashtags, Chinese state media CCTV, using platform moderation privileges to replace one hashtag with the other. This would demonstrate the power Chinese state media wields on Weibo: accounts that moderate trending hashtags have special privileges on the platform that enable content manipulation, such as artificially promoting or censoring certain posts.

Additionally, the hashtag #安倍晋三# (“Shinzo Abe”) trended for nearly two hours before a sudden disappearance from the leaderboards. It is conceivable that this could be another instance of censorship by content moderators to reduce the number of memes and comparisons to the former Japanese prime minister’s July 2022 assassination, particularly during a time when the state is trying to quell anti-Japanese sentiment that turned violent recently.

Over the span of a day, sixty-five different hashtags related to the shooting trended on Weibo. None of these hashtags by themselves had a significant narrative spin to it; they were mostly statements of fact, such as “Obama spoke out about Trump’s shooting” or “Trump made his first appearance six hours after the assassination.”

Once the story began to mature, more hashtags about various political commentators’ remarks began to appear. This includes comments by scholar Jin Canrong, who suggested that a Democrat likely tried to kill Trump, and former Taiwanese politician Chen Shui-bian, who compared the shooting to his own experience with almost being assassinated. Recounting that incident on Weibo, users speculated that the Chen shooting was an inside job engineered to gain sympathy and political support, then suggested that the Trump shooting could be a similar situation.

On the Chinese platform WeChat, an article titled “One Shot Produced a ‘Chosen One’ – A Quick Comment on Trump’s Assassination” had the most engagement related to the shooting, garnering more than 100,000 views and 10,000 shares. In the post, the WeChat account known as Chairman Rabbit argued that assassinations are an inherent part of Western electoral democracy, and speculated that Trump surviving the shooting will be a political windfall for him. The view that the shooting would bolster Trump’s chances in the election was also reflected in a trending hashtag on Weibo, #预测特朗普胜选率上升至70%# (“Trump’s chances of winning the election rose to 70%”).

The trending hashtags and discussions on Weibo are in line with how China regulates content on domestic social media platforms. In general, China seeks to preserve maximum flexibility in directing what netizens see and how they think about global events so that public opinion can never serve as a constraint on Chinese decision-making on foreign policy.  With the Trump shooting, Chinese censors sought to strike a balance between depicting China as a neutral party in the affair by focusing overwhelmingly on fact-based and US-based statements and analysis, while implicitly juxtaposing the stability of China’s political system as superior to that of US democratic system’s “violence and chaos.” At the same time, censors also exploit their own content moderation privileges, taking down platform narratives that are either too sympathetic to the United States, or too nationalistic or sensationalist, to avoid the proliferation of public opinions counterproductive to China’s political calculus in determining how to respond to breaking political news in the US.

Zoë Aikman and Kenton Thibaut, “China deployed anti-US narratives in chaos following Trump assassination attempt,” Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), August 1, 2024, https://dfrlab.org/2024/08/01/china-narratives-trump-shooting/.