On a trip to no-longer-rural south China this past week, I had the opportunity to ask a number of PRC citizens about the U.S. election. All of them gave roughly the same response:
a) The primary is a big deal. Chinese TV has been airing non-stop coverage of the U.S. election, in between local footage of Tibetian rebels locked up for their crimes and shots of natural disasters.
b) Nobody knows who John McCain is. Everyone thinks the election is between Hillary and Obama.
c) According to my guide, a 23-year-old English major from Zhongshan, Chinese people as a whole support Clinton. "In Asia there is a hierarchy. It's like, white people are the best, then yellow people are maybe middle, and black people are at the bottom. So Chinese prefer Hillary." The others I talked to made the same claim.
Luckily, they had a sense of perspective. "It doesn't matter what we think, though," one told me, "it's not our election."
--Barron YoungSmith