The commentary by Vice-President JD Vance on the Chinese avoided online tensions between the United States and China during a back and forth trade war.
“What has the globalist economy got the United States of America? And the answer is, fundamentally, it is based on two principles-resulting in a huge debt to buy things that other countries do for us,” Vance in Lawrence Jones on Show “Fox & Friends” said on April 3.
“To make a little clearer, we borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things that these Chinese peasants make,” said Vance.
It took a while, but clips from Vance’s interview became viral on Chinese social media in the following weeks and attracted an intense reaction. On April 7, a hashtag on Vance’s remarks became the most trendy subject on Weibo, the social media platform adjacent to Twitter from China, and accumulated a total of more than 150 million views by April 18.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian responded to the comments at a press conference on April 8: “He is both surprising and lamentable to hear this vice-president to make such ignorant and disrespectful remarks.
The Internet fire storm quickly followed, and anger against Vance spread in discussions related to American prices on China.
In a dramatic discourse on the prices that have accumulated millions of views, Xia Baolong, a Chinese politician and director of the Hong Kong and Macao business office, ended his speech by hitting Vance.
“That these American peasants moan in front of the 5,000 -year civilization of the Chinese nation,” said Xia.
“Vance said one day that the Chinese were” peasants “. This real” peasant “from the American campaign seems to have defects in perspective,” wrote Hu Xijin, the former editor influential of the Paper Times managed by the State, on a Weibo article discussing the possibility of a commercial decoupling between China and the United States.
“Listen, it’s their true face – arrogant and rude as always,” wrote a commentator from Weibo who has accumulated more than 3,000 likes.
“We are peasants, but we have the best high -speed rail system in the world, the most powerful logistical capacities and the main IA technology in the world, driving technology, drone technology, etc.”, wrote another commentator from Weibo. “Such peasants are still quite powerful.”
Some politically warned commentators have also underlined the irony of Vance’s remarks, given its own root roots, as described in its 2016 memory “Hillbilly Elegy”.
In memories, Vance recounts a childhood marked by poverty, abuses and the struggle of his mother with drug addiction, a large part spent in the Appalachians – a region which he dismissed as neglected by the rich elites. The book was widely considered attractive among the white working class and as an explanation of the rise of the billionaire.
“The vice-president Vance, don’t forget,” wrote a Chinese blogger on Zhi Hu, a Chinese micro-blogging platform, “a peasant gave birth to you!”
The White House did not respond to the request for comments from Business Insider.
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