Many Chinese See a Cultural Revolution in America

People in China find echoes of Maoist upheavals in the authoritarian turn that the United States is taking under Donald Trump.

- Li Yuan

As the United States grapples with the upheaval unleashed by the Trump administration, many Chinese people are finding they can relate to what many Americans are going through.

They are saying it feels something like the Cultural Revolution, the period known as "the decade of turmoil." The young aides billionaire Elon Musk has sent to dismantle the US government reminded some Chinese of the Red Guards whom Mao Zedong enlisted to destroy the bureaucracy at the peak of the Cultural Revolution. Upon hearing President Donald Trump's musing about serving a third term, they joked that China's leader Xi Jinping must be saying, "I know how to do it" — he secured one in 2022 by engineering a constitutional change.

The US helped China modernize and expand its economy in the hope that China would become more like America — more democratic and more open. Now, for some Chinese, the US is looking more and more like China.

"Coming from an authoritarian state, we know that dictatorship is not just a system — it is, at its core, the pursuit of power," journalist Wang Jian wrote in an X post criticizing Mr. Trump. "We also know that the Cultural Revolution was about dismantling institutions to expand control."

For these Chinese, who strive for democratic values but contend with an authoritarian state, their role model is tearing itself down. They are expressing their alarm in interviews, articles, and social media comments that range in emotion from disappointment and anger to sardonic.

"Beacon of democracy, 1776-2025," wrote a commenter on a post by the official Weibo social media account of the US Embassy in China.

They are witnessing things they thought could happen only in China: sycophantic official announcements, intimidation of the media and top entrepreneurs vying for favor from the leadership, not to mention a president who calls himself a king.