Roughly a year ago, an American social media influencer traveled from the United States to China to speak at a conference. While there, the young influencer, Jackson Hinkle, posted a photo of himself looking admiringly at another speaker: the Russian far-right intellectual Aleksandr Dugin.
The conference was organized by Guancha, a well-known and nationalistic Chinese outlet that facilitates discussions among political thinkers from China and elsewhere. As is typical of Guancha events, a confusing range of voices were represented, including Hinkle, an American who calls himself a “MAGA communist”; Dugin, a political philosopher aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin; and Grayson Walker, an American law student and online conspiracy theorist.
Together, they are part of a fragile but emerging global coalition that joins far-right elements in the United States, Russia, and China.
Guancha was founded by venture capitalist Eric Li, who made his fortune in Silicon Valley. In 2016, both before and after Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, Li praised Trump in various op-eds published by American outlets, pointing out that “much of the Chinese public supported him”—a fact that few people remarked on at the time—and speculating that, in the long term, Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping would essentially speak the same language of “might over right,” causing “Chinese-American relations [to] become healthier.”
Li is not alone. In China, where long-standing hostility toward an imperialist United States persists, many social media users have nonetheless become enamored with Trump and his movement, cheering on his 2020 campaign and reacting ecstatically to his 2024 electoral victory (though they’re less enthusiastic after his recent tariffs against China).
This admiration for Trump and the Western far right did not come out of thin air. For years, political conditions in China have fostered a growing coalition of Chinese who have found meaning in the cultural and political worldview of the Western far right.
To trace the roots of these views, we need to take a detour to 1995, when the Chinese government came out of the shadows of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and hosted the historic Fourth World Conference on Women. There, Hillary Clinton famously proclaimed that “women’s rights are human rights.” Her husband, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, would later help China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, claiming that economic liberties would most likely bring political liberties to China. For a while, they seemed right.
Chinese lawyers and activists made use of this new openness and coalesced into a “rights defense movement.” But the tide quickly turned again with the 2008 Beijing Olympics, marked by a massive expansion of government repression.
As Xi took office in 2013 and dismantled the liberal rights defense movement, China’s internet culture gave way to a panoply of pro-government tendencies. Attacks on liberal voices on social media became more common. Social tensions within Chinese society during the 2010s manifested not only in the form of explosive nationalism, but also as an interest in nonstate-sanctioned fringe ideologies, ranging from neo-Maoism to strains of far-right social conservatism.
But there was still something odd about the 2017 online attack on Feminist Voices, a prominent feminist social media account in China. Citing an old Feminist Voices post that defended a high school student’s right to wear a headscarf, netizens accused it of “sucking up to Islam.” Around the same time, social media users bombarded the United Nations refugee agency’s Weibo account with at least 20,000 negative comments on a run-of-the-mill post about the plight of displaced people.
These incidents mark a rise in far-right social sentiments in China regarding Islam, feminism, Black people, and the LGBTQ community. The sentiments are related to Chinese nationalism, which has a racial and supremacist strain with a long history typically expressed in the idea that the modern Chinese nation is made up of a superior “yellow race.” But they are also distinct in that the framing of these ideas has only recently begun to resemble, converge, and cross-fertilize with far-right discourses in the West.
In a study on far-right discourse in China, scholars Tian Yang and Kecheng Fang noted that just as the Western far right invented an “artificial crisis of white culture,” young Chinese conservatives have similarly claimed that their “majority culture … in China [is] in crisis due to the threats from minority groups,” which is a feeling reflected in incidents like the recent social media panic over halal food options on delivery apps.
But if the imagined superior white and yellow races are both threatened by nonwhite peoples and social liberalism, then they are also rivals. As political theorist Chenchen Zhang has pointed out, Chinese netizens consider their own political system to be superior, viewing the Chinese government’s “pragmatic, rational and non-moralizing approach to economic growth and social stability” as a better alternative to Western liberalism.
In their view, Western democracies have become corrupted by progressive values, which are not only unrealistic but also damaging to prosperity and social order. Chinese social media users have used a derogatory term to describe people promoting those values—baizuo, which literally translates to “white left.”
For these reasons, while Western far-right elements have sought to challenge the “elites” or “the establishment” (which includes the political consensus around democracy and universal values) in their respective countries, their Chinese counterparts have been supportive of the Chinese government. Islamophobic far-right Chinese have cheered on the authorities’ repression of Uyghur Muslims, even nudging the government to adopt a harder line on another Muslim minority group, the Hui.
Elsewhere, anti-feminists appeal to the government’s growing paranoia about foreign-backed “color revolutions,” accusing Chinese feminists of being foreign forces in the hopes of bringing down the government’s iron fist on their enemies. In recent years, Chinese anti-feminists have even imported concepts from the Western “manosphere” of online misogynists, borrowing terms such as “red pill men,” “men going their own way,” and “pickup artists.”
While Chinese government censors have occasionally shut down some of these accounts and removed their posts, many have been untouched or have been allowed to return and grow their followings. One such influencer, Knight Ziwu—known for attacking feminists and LGBTQ activists—has frequently bragged about his friendly negotiations with Weibo censors, who often advise him on which posts to take down.
Knight Ziwu has also appeared at official “internet management” events convened by the authorities. This stands in stark contrast to the official treatment of many online feminists—Feminist Voices, for instance, saw its social media accounts shut down and its organizers harassed by the government.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has also co-opted elements of this online brand of social conservatism. The Communist Youth League, a CCP vehicle typically used as a pipeline to funnel promising young people into political careers, has made a tremendous effort to recruit 18 million “civilization volunteers,” including some young men holding far-right views.
These efforts appear to be changing what remains of the CCP’s vestigial commitments to egalitarianism. In 2022, during a high-profile internet storm, the official account of the Communist Youth League called feminism “extreme” and “a cancer on the internet”—a significant departure from its revolutionary past of paying homage to “women holding up half the sky.” This hostility toward feminism has since spread to official rhetoric. This year, another part of China’s party-state, its internet regulatory apparatus, waged a monthlong campaign targeting “those who propagate gender polarization, extreme feminism, and the idea of not getting married nor having children.” In recent years, the Chinese government has also increasingly revoked preferential treatment for ethnic minorities, including for the all-important college entrance examinations.
Far-right ideas flow through several conduits. In China, popular social media platforms frequented by young men, like the sports forum Hupu, have become hotbeds for manosphere ideas. Fringe WeChat groups filled with both Chinese and Chinese American users promote Islamophobia and conspiracy theories. And although right-wing Christianity—a key vector for the spread of social conservatism in the United States, Europe, and Russia—has little to no pull in China due to state control of religion, Western far-right intellectuals have tried to draw equivalences between Christian and Confucian traditionalism.
Ideas flow from China, as well. In the United States, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and far-right blogger Rod Dreher popularized the Chinese concept of the white left to attack affirmative action and “a breakdown in gender norms.” In 2024, policy analyst Zhang Weiwei interviewed Hinkle; the video, which was posted on Bilibili and has half a million views, features Hinkle claiming that Leninist land reforms of the type China conducted violently in the 1950s would be “a much wiser solution for American homelessness.”
The camaraderie between illiberal and far-right forces in Russia, China, and the United States might not last. In an era of heightened great-power competition, conflicting desires for domination may soon break this fragile coalition, even before it manages to vanquish its wide range of perceived enemies—feminists, Islam, cosmopolitan liberals, and LGBTQ+ activists, among many others.
Regardless, these emerging political alliances are worth taking seriously, especially as the nationalist and authoritarian trends that enable them show no signs of slowing down.
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