Aaron Mak is a researcher at Politico.

Perhaps no one in the world would relish a general election campaign between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush—apart from the two candidates themselves—more than the mandarins in Beijing.

Already, official Chinese news coverage of the 2016 primary season is highlighting the back-and-forth baton exchange between the Clinton and Bush families. Other U.S. presidential candidates are often brushed off as long shots; many Chinese writers seem to have bypassed the primaries, already nominating the front-runners in order to fit the narrative.


Chinese journalists, often eager to take the party line, are framing the U.S. election—sometimes smugly, sometimes incredulously—as a battle between hereditary family clans.

The reason for this long-lens look at 2016 from Beijing seems clear. The ruling Chinese Communist Party is deeply sensitive to charges that it is non-democratic and the playground of “princelings”— a pejorative term for the class of Chinese business tycoons and political power players who trace their lineages to Communist veterans. Nothing helps to blunt that charge as much as the idea that American democracy is similarly corrupt. “The Chinese media, especially the Party media, has been using American elections as a way to discredit democracy,” says Kecheng Fang, a former reporter for the Southern Weekly in Guangzhou who now researches Chinese media at the University of Pennsylvania. “I think much of Chinese media has been referring to this election as Clinton 2.0 versus Bush 3.0, so it’s a very trendy topic.” As Weihua Chen, chief Washington correspondent for the China Daily, the government’s largest English-language newspaper, put it to me in an interview: “You guys always talk about being the greatest democracy, but now you have a democracy run by two families for more than a decade?”

A litany of articles from China's government-run print news outlets illustrates this trend. When Xinhua, China’s official news agency, reported on Jeb’s presidential announcement, the article focused entirely on the sorry state of familial politics in America. Xinhua also published a story tracing the history of political pedigrees in the United States, identifying the Kennedy, Roosevelt, Harrison and Adams families as examples of this nepotistic strain. Yet another article in the Global Times, a conservative CCP tabloid , opined that a second Bush-Clinton election “may lead to a compromised form of democracy that the U.S. has brandished.”

Of course, Chinese newspaper writers are hardly the first or only journalists to point out the uncomfortably dynastic tenor of this election. The Washington Post , New York Times and many others have written disparagingly about the topic. RT, a Kremlin-funded TV network often accused of being a pro-Russia mouthpiece, published an op-ed on its website gibing that Chelsea Clinton should marry George P. Bush, thus establishing a “single line of monarchy.”

The daily machinations of Chinese propaganda officials are murky, and the level of editorial control they exert can vary from paper to paper, so it’s impossible to tell for sure whether this overall focus on the family dynamics of the 2016 race is a directive from the higher-ups or a narrative being pushed by the journalists themselves. Fang elaborated in a later email, “For the Clinton vs. Bush dynasty case, I don’t have any evidence available to prove that it’s coordinated by propaganda officials. But I think it’s safe to say that the propaganda officials are guiding the direction in general.”

Bill Bishop, who runs the popular website Sinocism China Newsletter, sees the dynasty coverage as part of an attempt to legitimize the CCP’s authoritarian ideology. Official media is an effective instrument to that end, allowing the government to point out flaws in democracy while defending the Chinese political system. “It’s very easy for the propaganda guys if it’s a Bush-Clinton election,” Bishop says.

Among those likely eager to make this anti-democratic narrative stick is China’s President Xi Jinping, who would no doubt like to divert attention from the troubling fact that he, himself, is the product of a political dynasty. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a vice premier and is regarded as one of the founders of the CCP; thus the younger Xi is often labeled a princeling. Still, charges of nepotism in American politics could only come back to haunt Xi. “It’s a tricky question for the party media because Xi Jinping is also Xi 2.0,” says Kecheng Fang, who said he has seen comments from netizens to this effect when such articles are posted on Weibo, China’s social media giant.

At the same time, though, Xi has waged a massive anti-graft campaign against his own party, cleaning up the corruption and nepotism that runs rampant in the upper echelons of Chinese society. Although many see it as a cynical tactic to get rid of Xi’s political foes, the CCP has been crowing about its results. One can’t help but notice the potential juxtaposition that state media could be setting up: As U.S. leaders are becoming more nepotistic and sullied by money through campaign finance, Chinese leaders are making efforts to become less so. When asked about nepotism in China, Chen of the China Daily said, “China has always been in an evolutionary process. […] You could still say there are many problems, but it’s actually becoming better.”

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This isn’t the first time that the Chinese media has taken issue with the U.S. electoral system.

In the past two elections, state media pounced on campaign finance and the candidates’ moneyed patrons, especially the Koch brothers, and sniped about Barack Obama’s skimpy managerial C.V. Many in China were puzzled that voters had selected the politically adolescent Obama and twice passed over Mitt Romney, who, given the Chinese concept of selecting leaders, appeared to be the obvious choice. He had a Harvard MBA and J.D., had run the Salt Lake City Olympics, founded the prestigious Bain Capital and was the former governor of Massachusetts. Meanwhile, Obama seemed to lack executive experience as a junior senator.

In some ways, says Evan Osnos, the former China correspondent for the New Yorker, the Chinese may have seen a bit of their own president in Romney. “In Chinese terms, Mitt Romney’s résumé wasn’t all that different from Xi Jinping’s résumé,” Osnos says. Xi served as the party chief in Shanghai, the governor of Fujian, the governor of Zhejiang, the vice president of China—and the list of managerial achievements goes on. But more than that, even though he’s considered a princeling, there is a sense that he still started at the bottom and climbed his way up. In his first CCP position, he served as the deputy party secretary of a county in Hebei—a modest posting—after the party rejected his application to join roughly nine times due to controversies that swirled around his father.

After Romney’s unsuccessful runs and the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, mainstream Chinese news media seemed to double down on the argument—using Xi’s career as evidence—that China’s anti-democratic system ends up selecting experienced leaders in a more meritocratic process than U.S. elections. The China Daily’s chief Washington correspondent, Weihua Chen, praised Xi’s determined trudge to the top. He claimed, “You have to have a proven track record. You don’t take a helicopter—you have to build step by step to be promoted.” This is why he and others from official media believe that Xi is a more qualified leader than Obama, lobbing the same accusations of lack of experience that Republicans have used since 2008. In fact, the way that Obama skyrocketed to political prominence, assisted in no small part by his charisma, seems to unsettle Chen. He recalled the 2008 Democratic convention and said: “You guys always complain about Mao’s personal cult. I feel the same way about President Obama. You have the Obama badge, the portrait radiating out—almost like you’re looking at the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.”

Now China’s negative-tinted coverage of Western politics is extending into new areas. A viral video titled “How Leaders are Made” was uploaded in 2013 to China’s YouTube counterpart, Youku, and made a similar point of comparing the meritocratic selection of Xi to the baffling paths that Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron took to the executive office. The animated short, which has garnered more than 3 million views, is an excoriating takedown of campaign finance and the election season circus—all in the jaunty, colorful style of a PBS Kids cartoon. The producers of the 5-minute video are unknown; there is only one enigmatic credit at the end: “A studio on Fuxing Road.” But Time magazine suggested that it’s likely Chinese media officials who are behind the curtain. Beijing’s Fuxing Road is widely known for being home to many government departments, such as the General Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, and Television. In addition, fuxing in Chinese means revival, a word that, at the time, was the centerpiece of the CCP’s propaganda campaign calling for the restoration of China’s glory.

Kecheng Fang believes this video will usher in a new era of CCP messaging. Apart from viral videos, official media has co-opted bloggers. Zhou Xiaoping, who privately ran a popular conservative blog slamming the United States, received plaudits from Xi and now gets his rants printed in official newspapers.

“I think patriotic bloggers, and new types of videos using multimedia technologies, and social media will be the new trend in the coverage of next year’s presidential election,” Fang says. For the CCP, the advantages of such a strategy are two-pronged. Anti-democratic sentiment that is ostensibly organic won’t smack of a government clutching onto its authoritarian rule, but rather of citizens who prefer the Chinese political system. Also, the producers of such media can play fast and loose with the facts without serious repercussions. On the other hand, the party would be lambasted if it made errors in the official newspapers.

If Clinton and Bush are nominated in 2016, you can bet that the floodgates will open for a series of vitriolic articles from CCP gazettes.

In addition, if the Youku video is any indication for what may be in store for the future, the tricky part about tracing official Chinese media narratives in 2016 is that their messaging is increasingly shrouded in subterfuge. We may soon see a cartoon of murky provenance featuring Jeb and Hillary perched atop royal thrones with bejeweled scepters in hand. Election cycles are a ripe time to point out flaws in the American brand of democracy, and China is becoming a pro at peddling oppo.