BEIJING — Donald J. Trump isn’t Mr. Popular in Beijing lately. But China’s ruling elite seems to be consoling itself with the idea that the American president-elect will take charge of a country staggering into decline and disunion.

A flow of articles in Communist Party publications in recent weeks has argued that the United States’ tumultuous past year showed it to be dysfunctional and dissolute, and blighted by corruption, social and political polarization, reckless debt and an enfeebled news media.

“Can an American Dream sick with the American Disease last for long?” read a headline in the latest issue of Red Flag Papers, a party journal that has enjoyed renewed prominence in recent years.

“America’s political problems have long been the instigator of its other problems,” said the accompanying essay, by a researcher from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, one of the government’s main think tanks.