As Vickie Wang, an emerging performer, steps onto the stage in New York, she is not only thinking about what humor to deliver. She also weighs what subjects to avoid. “I refrain from directly attacking the administration,” she stated. And when she does, she makes certain it's not captured for online platforms. “I would never publish openly material in which I openly disparage authorities … I think it's a habit acquired back home.”
Wang, thirty-nine, resided in Shanghai for almost ten years, leaving in 2022. By 2025, she relocated to the US. Upon arrival, she dove into a frenzy of “revenge bingeing on freedom,” attending talks, demonstrations, and exploring New York’s library system.
But in the year after Donald Trump returned to office for the second time, there has been a noticeable shift in the environment, she notes. “In China, I knew the boundaries, while in the US I'm standing on unstable ground.”
Her fears mirror an emerging climate in the US which many Chinese, or people with experience in China, find eerily familiar. Opponents face exclusion. The leader expects absolute loyalty. Reporters are targeted. Establishments come under fire.
Trump has openly expressed about his admiration for China's leader, China’s strongman leader. He has described Xi as a “great guy”. As they agreed a brief ceasefire in the trade war on Thursday, the bonhomie between both figures of countries with vastly different political systems became clear. And after decades of optimism in the US that improved relations with the East may help the rising power become more open, in the current administration, it appears that America is shifting in the Chinese direction, instead of the other way around.
“The United States is undergoing an era of cultural revolution,” said Zhang Qianfan, an academic at a top Chinese university. “The top leader, Trump, is attempting to mobilise the grassroots in order to sideline or weaken established figures … similar to events in the country half a century ago.”
Ever since the administration unleashed what's termed a government streamlining body, or the agency, on the Washington bureaucracy at the start of his term, numerous Chinese observers have viewed American governance through the lens of China's historical period. Whether it is the mobilisation of young people to carry out the leader’s will, or purging institutions of those deemed opposition, the president from a Chinese viewpoint has brought Mao-style chaos to America, albeit absent equivalent degrees of violence.
However since the upheaval of the initial period of the new administration subsided, a new, different kind of political atmosphere has emerged in the country, which variously also feels familiar to many Chinese people.
‘The Beacon Has Become Less Bright’
The most profound similarity between Trump’s America and China is the crackdown on open expression.
Deng Haiyan, now a Chinese Communist party dissenter, found himself in the eye of a storm this year, similar to what he’d only previously experienced in his homeland. He has lived in America for several years, after escaping the country due to harassment from officials.
Last fall, following the passing of Charlie Kirk, Deng tweeted that Kirk was a “scumbag”. Similar to others across the US – who lost their jobs as a result of expressing criticism regarding him – Deng faced significant backlash. His family was doxed and he was accused of being a Chinese spy seeking to divide the US.
“That event surprised me deeply. I never imagined such a thing could happen in America – something that typically happens in an authoritarian country,” Deng said.
Deng’s pile on originated from online peers, rather than the government, but that kind of public monitoring bears similarities with the East.
“Regarding targeting dissenters and starting to surveil open discourse about issues deemed controversial … That’s starting to emerge here,” said Maria Repnikova, an associate professor at Georgia State University. “This is that you see in the East today as too,” she added, adding that concerns are rising in America of pupils informing against teachers, a type of monitoring promoted by the CCP.
Zhang, the Peking University law professor, said that progressive thinkers such as him once turned to the US for political inspiration, since public debate on domestic politics in China is risky. But now, “America is no longer some kind of god for Chinese liberals. America’s image has declined generally.”
“We once viewed America as the symbol of democratic governance, but after Trump took power, that guide appears less luminous”.
Progressive Chinese, who are often, at least in private, critical of the nation's governance, are increasingly finding it less objectionable than America’s, he stated. “It’s sort of painful to accept this reality … but after the pandemic, the government seems to be doing the right thing in environmental protection and promoting EVs and tech investment,” he noted, while “Western nations, exemplified by America, appear in decline.”
The government's purchase of shares in American firms has prompted parallels with the East, where the distinction between state and private industry is often blurred.
On Monday, authorities stated it will take a shareholder in a startup specialising in rare earth processing, following comparable shares in other companies it considers essential for the country's safety. These moves have made certain stakeholders nervous that America is entering a new era of government meddling in private industry.
Yet, there remain major differences between the US under Trump and China. In October, several news organisations among others refused to sign to a defense department rule that required they only report on approved news. American judiciary have blocked or reversed numerous Trump’s actions, an action that is unthinkable in the nation's CCP-controlled legal system.
An analyst, who established of Strategy Risks, specializing in China, said: “The United States might face the worst crisis of all time, far more severe than it is now, and it will still be more free, more open, and more liberal than the East under its leader.”
Zhang notes that although many intellectuals in China were shocked to see American colleges yield to government demands regarding diversity and inclusion practices and open discourse on university grounds, in China, the top universities are all state-owned inherently. University leaders, which are selected by the state, “cannot refuse. They can’t afford to be disobedient.”
Still, Americans are beginning to adopt measures previously confined to more authoritarian countries. An academic at a US university once outspoken on US-China issues declined to speak for this article. He said: “Honestly, I fear of the censorship in the US: I actually feel more comfortable to criticise Xi these days than say anything bad
