As Melania returns to the White House, she’s winning Chinese fans

Joyce Yip, a 39-year-old entrepreneur in southern China’s Guangzhou, has a new celebrity crush: Melania Trump.

The two-time first lady has become an online celebrity in China, especially among women. That may be surprising, given her husband’s hostility toward China, but social media posts reflect an admiration for her independence, her taste in fashion and how she’s raising her teenage son.

And, perhaps most importantly, her stoic allegiance to President Donald Trump despite his misogynistic comments, allegations that he’s had extramarital affairs and his being found liable for sexual abuse in a civil suit brought by a New York advice columnist.

“She looks heroic, elegant and resolute, so powerful and majestic, loving it so much,” Yip wrote on the Instagram-like platform Xiaohongshu after the inauguration last month.

After the first lady wore a wide-brimmed hat to the inauguration, similar products appeared on online shops and knitting influencers on Xiaohongshu posted videos showing people how to make their own within 48 hours.

By China’s conventional standards, women are expected to be supportive of their husbands and to focus on raising children. But Melania Trump’s streaks of independence also appeal to Chinese fans, as does her ascent from small-town Slovenian roots to the top of the world’s social ladder.

“Chinese fans like her having both traditional and modern sides of a woman,” said Jingsi Wu, an associate professor of media studies at Hofstra University in New York.

Both sides are on display in a 4-year-old video that showed Melania Trump refusing to hold her husband’s hand as they disembarked from Air Force One. The video has scored more than 5 million “likes” on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and still generates views and comments.

Around half a million people liked a November post on Xiaohongshu that joked about how unwilling the usually reserved Melania Trump must be to return to the very public life of a first lady. A satire in The New Yorker magazine meant to be critical of her marriage to the president received 1 million views on Bilibili, a YouTube-like platform, and only seemed to boost her popularity.

Almost 30,000 people liked a November post about a years-old interview Melania Trump and her husband did on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, saying their relationship was “super sweet.”

Ge Yahan is among Melania’s fans. The 24-year-old from Zibo on China’s eastern coast calls Melania a mysterious lady who was brave enough to follow her dreams from a small town in Slovenia to the United States.

Her celebrity crush brings in a bit of pocket money too. She has been selling unauthorized copies of Melania’s new self-titled memoir translated to Mandarin by AI on China’s social media underground for eight yuan ($1.10).

Donald Trump has been openly critical of China’s economic practices as barriers to America’s financial success. He launched a trade war during his first term by imposing hefty tariffs on Chinese imports, adding more after he returned to office last month. Earlier this year, Trump claimed, without evidence, that thousands of Chinese immigrants are flooding the U.S. to build an “army”  and attack America.

But Wu, the academic, said people in China often see U.S. politics as akin to a soap opera. MDT/AP