As Vickie Wang, a rising performer, takes the stage in the Big Apple, she is not just considering which jokes to tell. She also weighs which topics to steer clear of. “I don't engage in directly criticizing the administration,” she explained. And when she ventures there, she makes certain it's not recorded for social media. “I'd never publicly share material in which I directly criticize authorities … I think it's a learned behavior acquired back home.”
Wang, thirty-nine, resided in the Chinese metropolis for nearly a decade, departing in 2022. In 2025, she relocated to America. When she got there, she embarked on a frenzy of “overindulging on freedom,” going to talks, protests, and delving into New York’s library system.
However over the past year since the president was elected for the second time, there has been a “palpable change” in the environment, she notes. “In China, I understood the boundaries, whereas here I find myself on unstable ground.”
Wang’s fears mirror a new political reality in America which many Chinese, or people with experience in China, perceive as disturbingly similar. Enemies are ostracised. The president expects total allegiance. Reporters face scrutiny. Establishments come under fire.
The president has not been shy about his admiration for China's leader, China’s authoritarian figure. He's called Xi as a “great guy”. As they agreed a brief ceasefire in economic tensions on Thursday, the bonhomie between the two leaders of nations with diametrically opposed governance models became clear. Following years of hope in the US that closer ties with China could assist the growing nation to liberalise, under Trump 2.0, it appears as if the US is being pulled in the Chinese direction, rather than the other way around.
“America is experiencing a period of cultural revolution,” stated a constitutional law expert, a professor at Peking University. “The top leader, Donald Trump, is trying to rally the masses to marginalize or weaken the elite … similar to events in the country decades past.”
Since Trump initiated the so-called Department for Government Efficiency, or the agency, on the Washington bureaucracy at the start in office, many in China have viewed US politics through the lens of the Cultural Revolution. Be it the mobilisation of young people to carry out the leader’s will, or cleansing institutions of perceived enemies, the president from a Chinese viewpoint has brought Mao-style chaos to the US, though without equivalent degrees of force.
But after the upheaval of the early months under Trump has calmed, an unfamiliar, different kind of climate has emerged in the US, which variously seems familiar to numerous Chinese people.
‘The Beacon Has Become Dimmer’
The deepest parallel between Trump’s America and China is the suppression on free speech.
Deng Haiyan, turned Chinese Communist party dissenter, ended up in a controversy recently, similar to what he once faced in China. He has lived in the US since 2019, after escaping the country due to harassment from officials.
Last fall, after the death of Charlie Kirk, he posted that the individual was a “scumbag”. Like people nationwide – who were fired for making negative comments about Kirk – Deng faced significant backlash. His family was doxed and he was accused of espionage attempting to divide the US.
“This incident was a real shock. I hadn't thought that something like this would occur in the United States – what typically happens in a repressive state,” Deng said.
His backlash came from fellow social media users, instead of the government, but that kind of public monitoring bears parallels with the East.
“Regarding going after dissenters and starting to surveil public speech on topics deemed controversial … It's appearing here,” said Maria Repnikova, a scholar at Georgia State University. “That’s something that you see in the East now as too,” she added, adding that there were now fears in the US of students reporting on teachers, a type of monitoring promoted by the CCP.
Zhang, the legal expert, said that progressive thinkers such as him used to look to America for ideals, since public debate on internal affairs in the country is risky. However, “The US isn't a ideal for Chinese liberals. The US's reputation has declined across the board.”
“We used to see the US as the symbol of democratic governance, but after Trump took power, this lighthouse appears dimmer”.
Chinese liberals, typically, behind closed doors, critical of the nation's governance, are increasingly finding it less objectionable than the US's, he stated. “It’s sort of painful to accept this reality … but after the pandemic, authorities seems to be doing correct policies in environmental protection and developing electric cars and tech investment,” Zhang said, while “Western nations, exemplified by America, appear in decline.”
The government's purchase of shares in American firms has also drawn parallels with China, where the distinction between government and private industry is frequently unclear.
On Monday, the US government announced it will take a shareholder in a new company specialising in rare earth processing, after taking comparable shares in other companies it considers vital to national security. The deals have made some investors nervous that the US is entering a fresh phase of government meddling in private industry.
There are still major differences between Trump’s America and the East. Last month, several news organisations including the Guardian refused to sign to a Pentagon policy that demanded reporting solely on government-authorised information. American judiciary have halted or overturned numerous presidential measures, an action that is impossible in the nation's party-dominated judiciary.
Isaac Stone Fish, the founder of Strategy Risks, specializing in China, commented: “America could descend into its gravest challenge of its history, far more severe than it is now, and it would remain freer, open, and more liberal than China under Xi.”
The professor observes that while many intellectuals in China were surprised to see American colleges capitulate to government demands concerning DEI policies and open discourse on campus, in China, the top universities are all state-owned by default. Administrators, who are appointed by the government, “cannot of saying no. They dare not to be disobedient.”
Nevertheless, people in the US are beginning to take precautions that were once confined to repressive regimes. One professor at an American college once outspoken on US-China issues declined to be interviewed for this article. He stated: “The truth is, I am scared of the censorship here: I genuinely feel more comfortable to criticise Xi now than say anything bad
