Ding’s anti-Muslim animus may seem to come out of nowhere, but tensions between China’s ethnic Han population and the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority, have been on the rise. Muslims point to profound discrimination by Han Chinese, while Han complain about a series of gruesome terrorist attacks carried out by Uighurs. These tensions boiled over in the July 2009 riots in the northwestern city of Urumuqi between the Han and the Uighurs. Five years later in March 2014, a knife attack in the southwestern city of Kunming in March 2014 left 29 civilians dead and more than 140 injured.

When I asked Ding about Trump’s anti-China policies, he replied, “You can’t have your butt decide your belt,” a Chinese expression I’d never heard before, but which he said means one shouldn’t do something only to protect his or her interests. He saw himself as an evangelist of the Trump cause, of those who speak out about the threat he thinks Muslims pose to the Western (and Chinese) world order. Also, he plans to marry later this year, but worries that having a wife could make receiving a green card difficult. He doesn't seem to have concrete plans to emigrate just yet, and wants to keep his Chinese citizenship—“I love China,” he told me. So he’s hesitant. In the meantime, he thinks publicly supporting Trump, in the event that he wins, couldn’t hurt his chances of getting into America.

Ding regards himself as an exceptionally high-quality immigrant—a rare talent that America would wholeheartedly welcome. He doesn’t want an America run by Clinton, who he criticized throughout the debate for her “hypocrisy,” her insistence on believing that people are equal, and for being “all flower and no fruit”—flash without substance. Instead, he wants an America that Trump makes great, and (mostly) white. “Trump is not against immigration, just illegal immigration,” Ding told me. “He wants people like me to come to America, not Muslim extremists.”

Ding explained how he and Trump agree on what Ding sees as the polluting nature of Muslims, African immigrants, and Mexicans, and expounded on the Western media’s “defamation” of Trump and Clinton, and President Barack Obama’s “indulgence” of gay and transgender people. Like Trump, Ding repeats half-truths and dolled-up lies about the crimes of American immigrants, the rights of powerful men to “play” women, and Clinton’s alleged rigging of American democracy.

Ding works as a securities and futures analyst for China Investment Securities, a major mainland securities firm. Like Trump, he likes to repeat self-aggrandizing facts, as if to will himself and his listener into believing them. (I was unable to independently confirm anything Ding said about himself.) He told me that he’s studied Wall Street tycoons like the billionaire Ray Dalio and George Soros (“When the price of gold collapsed I made a good amount of money,” he claimed), and that he plans “to exceed them.” I have spent a total of seven years in China, off and on, and Ding is the first person I’ve met who uses the word “humble” as an insult.