In particular, the state media has fixated on protests in American cities — starting this summer with the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, through the protests surrounding the election — as proof that American democracy is chaotic.
After Mr. Biden won Pennsylvania, and thus the presidency, CCTV, the state broadcaster, aired videos of large crowds in Philadelphia on Saturday evening and a heavy police presence. An anchor declared that there had been “not only verbal attacks but also even physical clashes” between Trump and Biden supporters. (In reality, there were few reports of violent confrontations.)
Hu Xijin, the editor of Global Times, pointed to Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede, writing on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, that “American society is now highly divided, which creates the soil for further political derailment.”
The outlets had been emphasizing the potential for political violence all week as the vote counts trickled in. Since Election Day, the Chinese state media had shared photos of boarded-up businesses and police officers on watch at poll sites.
At the time the race was called, the second top trending topic on Weibo was the drive-by shooting of two people attending a pro-Trump rally in Florida on Friday. Few posts mentioned that the shots fired were pellet rounds, or that the two people were treated for minor injuries and released.
Some state-controlled outlets had seemed to revel in the instability. Just minutes before the race was called for Mr. Biden on Saturday, People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, had mocked Mr. Trump’s declared refusal to accept the election results.
Mr. Trump, about an hour earlier, had tweeted, falsely, that he had won the election. The People’s Daily account retweeted that post, adding the comment, “HaHa” and a laughing emoji.