CHINA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/TRUMP PEOPLE: “In a downtown cafe in Washington one recent winter morning, Xia Yeliang’s impassioned defense of Donald Trump’s politics pulled some patrons’ attention away from their mugs. Inquisitive eyes darted toward where Xia sat, as he enthusiastically navigated a litany of conservative Republican talking points: welfare reform, immigration control, the migrant caravan, the perils of a Bernie Sanders presidency. Curiosity would likely have turned to surprise had the customers known who Xia was: a Chinese dissident who signed the seminal Charter 08 pro-democracy manifesto and who was stripped of his Peking University professorship in 2013 amid reports he had delivered ‘anti-Party and anti-socialist’ speeches to students. Now living in Washington after fleeing China in 2014 and in the middle of writing a book about what he calls the Chinese people’s 100-year-old unfulfilled dream of constitutional democracy, Xia is but one of an unabashed pro-Trump contingent within the US Chinese dissident community.”
–Owen Churchill, “Meet the Chinese dissidents rooting for President Trump,” Politico, February 27, 2019 9:11 pm