The United States presidential campaign came to an end, with Donald Trump elected as president with 47.8% of the popular vote, as compared to Hillary’s 47.4%.
It was a result that was no surprise to China’s Paul the octopus, a monkey in the South. It didn’t surprise small factory owners in the East coast city Yiwu, China’s kingdom of small manufactured goods, either.
As reported, some small manufacturers in the city received many more orders of the masks of Donald Trump than those of Hillary Clinton from America.
At the beginning, the ratio of mask orders for Trump, Clinton, and Sanders was 3:2:1. Then buyers ceased to demand those for Sanders.
The mask maker predicted that Trump would be the winner, Chinese news portal NetEase reported.
In Weibo, China’s prominent social media platform, 660,000 are involving in the topic of Trump winning the U.S. presidential election.
A Weibo opinion leader called “Jiazhuang Zainiuyue”, or “Pretend to be in New York” in English, said that Trump’s presidency marks the triumph of social networking over traditional mainstream media. They compared this presidential election with the race between Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, when live broadcasting of the presidential debate was on TV for the first time.
Radio listeners believed Nixon would win, but the confident and poised Kennedy impressed thousands of TV viewers and defeated Nixon.
For the current election, mainstream American newspaper and TV stations were not optimistic about Trump. Even at the beginning of the election day on November 8, the New York Times’ real-time polling showed that Clinton’s chances of winning was as high as 85%.
Some said that American social networks suggested a different outcome, that many users picked Trump over Clinton.
The reason why the Democrats failed was also analyzed by Chinese netizens. They said that “Over the past few years, the Democrats tried to please the top 1% Wall Street elites and African minorities, but ignored the majority of Americans. These majority voters did not necessarily support Trump.”
The future of America, as some Chinese users predicted, may see two major aspects of the economy – finance and the internet – go down.
(Top photo from Baidu Images)