The only presidents China ever took seriously were Eisenhower, H W Bush, & Clinton - all others they have been entirely indifferent to because our policy has not changed from Nixon through Obama and Biden has continued what Trump did so it's clear to them that whomever is president, the trade war will continue
Eisenhower - former general despite that he benched MacArthur for advocating nuking China, for all China knew he was still considering it and they built nuclear fallout shelters throughout the country because they were convinced the USA was going to nuke them
here's the interior of one fresh with propaganda art of the era
the homeless in Beijing all live in an underground bunker city much like the tunnels of vegas
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/antoni...-atomic-rooms/
i was once hiking on a mountain in shandong province to collect weed (it grows there everywhere naturally and nobody knows what it is) and we came across this massive steel and concrete vault door - thing must have been like 4' thick and luckily we had a flashlight in the event we stayed up too long by accident so we went in and did a little bit of exploring - place was insane
H W Bush former ambassador to China, UN, and head of the CIA - someone who knew how to get things done and had a history with china
Clinton they were always really impressed by his intellect and took him very seriously as from their perspective he had the balls to order an airstrike on their embassy and just say "whoopsies we had an old map" and dare them to retaliate - conspiracy is that china had taken the wreckage of the only stealth bomber ever shot down to their embassy and we hit it to destroy it - which seems a bit more plausible than intentionally targeting a building in the embassy district and not double checking to see if it's an embassy or not
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United...sy_in_Belgrade
however, this was the only bombing mission conducted by nato that the CIA had requested in the entire campaign
Quote:
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet testified before a congressional committee that the bombing was the only one in the campaign organized and directed by his agency,[6] and that the CIA had identified the wrong coordinates for a Yugoslav military target on the same street
so basically as far as chinese are concerned there's no chance this was an accident - i'd still regularly get grief from chinese people who are angry we bombed their embassy on purpose
everyone else they basically dismissed as either too stupid to be a concern or too focused on other issues to matter to china
mao openly regarded nixon and kissinger as complete idiots because they were just giving everything and asking nothing in return because they believed that simply opening china up would lead to their government toppling and whomever rose from the ashes would go back to being an ally of the usa and trade partner once again
which is kind of funny because to this day nixon and kissinger are still widely lauded for "opening up china" whereas China was going to open up to the USA no matter what because their relationship with USSR had soured so much because USSR wanted them as a puppet state like mongolia & poland and they didn't - china had kicked out tens of thousands of russian advisors and they were fighting a hot border conflict where several dozen soldiers died on each side
mao even built a range of artificial hills in the land between mongolian border and beijing because he was worried the ruskies would tank rush to beijing and install a more maleable puppet - he was going to the US no matter what and he couldn't believe he found the USA courting them instead of playing hard to get as they should have
another reason why china doesn't take our presidents seriously because they don't think many of them are very smart
their party structure ensures that basically all the decision makers are really intelligent people, many are genuine genius level intellects - they nearly all have degrees in engineering or sciences and need to take a certain career path that ensures competency
like xi is considered a creature of the party because his dad was such a big deal - they ignore the fact that when xi was a teenager he was exiled to the countryside because his dad was purged from the party - guy was living in abject poverty in a little village and applied to join the party several times before they finally admitted him in and then worked his way up from the lowest positions & got a chemical engineering degree from the most prestigious university in all of china along the way
so yes he definitely had some help in that as his dad's gravitas definitely helped him get a second look whereas others wouldn't - but this is also how his dad's political career ended - but he still did the rest on his own - if his dad was a guarantee of success then how do you explain the thousands of other Xis out there who all have parents of similar or more prestigious backgrounds who aren't president?
can you guess which one is him?
meanwhile, this is mao's grandson
he's given a ceremonial role with zero authority or power
tldr - china absolutely does not care who wins the next election