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Between Christine O’Donnell’s delusions that China has a “strategic plan to take over America,” and Illinois Democrat Alexi Giannoulias’s confused accusation that raising money from American businessmen working in China constitutes “economic treason,” Red-China-baiting hasn’t reached such rhetorical splendor in U.S. politics since, perhaps, 1882, when Congress passed the first American law to bar a group based on its national origin—The Chinese Exclusion Act—after anti-Chinese riots against the “yellow peril.”

But dig into the Chinese view of this election and you’ll find that all of this blather has been refracted in some telling ways. Take “The Chinese Professor,” the political ad produced for the Citizens Against Government Waste, that depicts a Chinese lecturer, twenty years in the future, cackling over the red-white-and-blue and crowing, “now they work for us.” This might seem like prime red meat for China’s “angry youth,”—and, indeed, it has attracted its share of predictable comments in that spirit—“This sounds great! It’s going to be the reality,” as one Chinese commentator put it, on the video site Tudou. But after six days, in which the video has attracted 548,271 hits and four pages of comments, most Chinese viewers seem not to have the remotest idea that this ad is related to the election. (They have a point.) They are interpreting it as either 1) anti-Chinese propaganda put out by the U.S. government; 2) evidence that Americans are really scared of China’s rising power; 3) a nationalist video made by people who believe in the future of China.

It’s easy to forget that most Chinese still see their country as hopelessly far beyond the U.S., so the following kind of reaction to the ad is common: “A country that couldn’t be any weaker is always emphasizing its rising clout, while a truly powerful country is always dwelling on its weakness and vulnerability—how ironic.”

Since O’Donnell has invoked China as an enemy of convenience, it might displease her to discover that she has attracted at least a few fans here. While the vast majority of the reaction in the Chinese press has been bafflement—“At her nomination celebration, O’Donnell, dressed in a business suit, looked just like an office worker, but her words made her sound like the head of a guerrilla army on the eve of revolution,” the Beijing News reported—the white-collar chat room known as Douban has a “Republican Rocks” forum that includes, among others, a commentator who has posted photos of O’Donnell and gushed “Let’s donate some money.” “Except suggesting sending troops to Iran,” he writes elsewhere, “this beautiful girl has no other weaknesses.” (A hoax? If it is, the perfect Chinese syntax suggests that it would have to be some seriously specialized hoaxing.)

One notable point is that Chinese reporters have been less impressed by the potential effect of the Tea Party than their American counterparts. “The Tea Party is a product of a certain period of time,” as a recent piece from China National Radio put it. “As the economy gets back on track, with more income and more stable jobs—when the country is richer, and people will be more at ease—the Tea Party will probably not have as many supporters. This is a bit like those radical anti-war organizations that popped up in America in the past. After some time, their voices faded out. When that day comes, we will realize that the Tea Party movement had pushed forward some rather insignificant figures in the world of American politics.”

Bottom line: All in all, the Chinese have been left puzzled by the midterms, which appear, from afar, to be defined by a kind of cognitive dissonance. From the Chinese perspective, Americans appear to be thrashing against the realities of a new era: faced with a sudden sense of weakness and global changes in power, Americans look unable to summon the energy or unity to make even the simplest self-sustaining choices, and instead, are seeking refuge in the tinny appeals and false comfort of demagogues. “Americans are feeling quite contradictory,” as a piece in the Southern Daily put it recently. “[T]hey want to build more railroads, train stations and schools, they want to use clean energy, but they don’t want to pay higher taxes in order to do all of these. They are the offspring of immigrants and feel very proud of that, and yet they also oppose the idea of immigration.”

Thanks to LuHan for her great ideas on this subject.

This post is part of The New Yorker’s ongoing coverage of the midterm elections.