On US presidential election night in 2004, the US embassy in Beijing invited the press and Chinese guests to watch the results on a giant screen in the Great Wall Sheraton on the morning of November 3 Beijing time. The embassy staff placed two boxes at the entrance marked “George W Bush” and “John Kerry”, and the Chinese guests, if they liked, could drop a “ballot” in either of the boxes. The Bush box got more votes by a wide margin.
I asked a Chinese guest how he had voted and why. He smiled wryly, saying that he voted for Bush out of deference for a sitting president, and, moreover, Bush was a Republican.
The Chinese tend to favour Republicans in American politics. When I was growing up in Taiwan, Republicans stood for anti-communism and support for a free China. Democrats were said to be soft on communism.
Democrat president Franklin D Roosevelt was remembered as having snubbed China at the Yalta Conference, where he used recognition of Mongolian independence from China as a bargaining chip to encourage the Soviets to declare war against Japan.
My fellow students in the National Taiwan University sometimes grumbled that the road in from the university named after Roosevelt was a disgrace.
In a televised debate, Senator John F Kennedy, a Democrat presidential candidate, dismissed Quemoy-Matsu as two little pieces of unimportant real estate, while the Republican Richard Nixon rebutted that these offshore islands were in the “area of freedom”, and should not be surrendered to the communists as a matter of “principle”.
It was the same Nixon 12 years later who ushered in normalisation of relations between the United States and the PRC and de-recognised Taipei as the sole legitimate government of China.