President Donald Trump alleged that China engaged in a campaign to influence the 2020 US election, aiming to prevent his re-election. This sparked a circulating claim online that China had dismissed his accusations as "hilarious." An investigation into this claim has been prompted.
Claim: China dismisses Trump’s election interference allegations as ‘hilarious.’
The assertion that China has responded to Trump’s claims of 2020 election interference has gained traction on social media platforms, with some posts receiving tens of thousands of views. These posts suggest that Chinese officials found Trump’s claims amusing, stating he was "single-handedly ending a century of American hegemony without China having to spend a single dollar or fire a single bullet."
Fact Check: The claim that China called the allegations ‘hilarious’ is false and originated from satire.
While China has officially refuted Trump’s assertions of US election meddling, labeling them as "pure fabrications and malicious smears," the specific claim that they described the situation as "hilarious" is unsubstantiated. Furthermore, the accompanying statement about Trump single-handedly undermining American hegemony is baseless.
Searches for this claim in reputable news outlets yielded no relevant results, suggesting it would have garnered significant media attention if it were true. The origin of this particular narrative has been traced to a parody account on X, formerly known as Twitter, called "The Halfway Post," which explicitly identifies itself as a source of satire.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian, when questioned about Trump’s claims, stated, "The relevant claims made by the US side are pure fabrications and malicious smears that have long since been proven to be groundless statements." He added, "China has… no interest in the US election and has never interfered in it." Lin urged the US to "reflect on its own actions, stop baselessly smearing China, refrain from making an issue of China in its elections, and do more to benefit China-US relations."
No evidence supports Donald Trump’s claim of election interference.
Trump stated that newly declassified intelligence indicated China accessed sensitive voter information during the 2020 election. He claimed, "The People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files." He also alleged that the Chinese government attempted to identify and pay US journalists who had published negative articles about him to write more such pieces.
However, US intelligence agencies concluded there was no evidence suggesting that any foreign government altered the technical aspects of the 2020 presidential election.