It didn’t require an acute sense of hearing to register the sighs of relief from many quarters around the world when Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump was called by leading American news networks Saturday. From the mayor of Paris, the message was an exuberant “Welcome back America!”⎯and that spirit of encouragement was matched in places as far flung as Canada, South Korea and Ethiopia, even if the language was slightly more restrained.
In certain other quarters, just as predictably, mum was the word. Vladimir Putin, who rushed to congratulate Trump four years ago, passed the first few days after the Biden breakthrough in silence, under the pretense that nothing about the American outcome has become official yet. Other regimes that had become invested in Trump’s leadership, from Brasilia to Riyadh to Pyongyang, were similarly mute.
Given its rising power, the most interesting case—and arguably most important to the future—is that of Beijing. China, of course, has been as quiet as Russia at the official level about Biden’s election. But for months, Chinese society has been unusually wrapped up in American presidential politics, which is all the more remarkable given the impossibility Chinese citizens face in choosing their own leaders, or even speaking up openly about them.