In Photos: How People Across Asia Reacted to Joe Biden’s Win
November 9, 2020It was within a few hours of midnight in Asia by the time American media confirmed Joe Biden would be the 46th President of the United States—meaning millions of people across India, Korea, China, Japan, Indonesia, Australia and the Asia-Pacific region at large awoke on Sunday morning to discover that a new leader of the free world had been elected overnight.
Many Americans reacted to the news in fairly predictable ways: taking to the streets, dancing under fireworks and generally celebrating the end of Donald Trump’s reign. But such a momentous occasion also sent shockwaves right around the world, rippling throughout the Asia-Pacific and eliciting reactions from people in every corner of the region.
Chinese citizens applauded Biden’s "well-deserved victory" and mocked Trump’s spectacular defeat; locals in Indonesia rode rickshaws through the street sporting facemasks of the new President- and Vice President-elect; and people in Thulasendrapuram village, Kamala Harris’ ancestral home, let off celebratory fireworks.
Some 1,200 miles away, at his home in New Delhi, Harris' uncle Balachandran Gopalan was offered sweets by locals in celebration of his niece’s victory. Japanese investors and traders cheered as the country’s stock exchange boosted to a 29-year-high. And all around the region, people breathed a collective sigh of relief that after four tumultuous years Trump is finally set to leave the White House.
Biden is just the fifth candidate to defeat an incumbent U.S. president in the past century. He has won the most votes in American history, topping his 2008 running mate, President Obama. Harris, meanwhile, will be the first person of South Asian descent, the first woman, and the first woman of colour to hold the office of vice president in the U.S.
