When Vickie Wang, an emerging performer, steps onto the stage in the Big Apple, she is not just thinking about what humor to deliver. She also carefully considers which topics to avoid. “I don't engage in directly criticizing the administration,” she stated. And when she does, she ensures it isn't captured for social media. “I would never publish openly content where I openly disparage authorities … I think it's a learned behavior from China.”
The comedian, thirty-nine, resided in Shanghai for almost a decade, leaving in 2022. In 2025, she moved to the US. When she got there, she dove into an intense period of “revenge bingeing on democracy,” going to talks, protests, and delving into the city's library system.
However over the past year after Donald Trump was elected for the second time, there has been a “palpable change” in the environment, she says. “In China, I understood where the line was, while here I'm standing on shifting sands.”
Her concerns reflect an emerging climate in America which many Chinese, or people who have lived in the country, perceive as disturbingly similar. Enemies face exclusion. The president demands absolute loyalty. Journalists face scrutiny. Institutions come under fire.
The president has not been shy about his admiration for China's leader, the nation's authoritarian figure. He has described him as a “great guy”. As they agreed a temporary truce in the trade war on Thursday, the bonhomie between the two leaders of nations with vastly different governance models was evident. Following years of optimism in America that closer ties with the East may help the growing nation to liberalise, in the current administration, it appears that the US is shifting in the Chinese direction, rather than the other way around.
“America is experiencing a period of cultural revolution,” said a constitutional law expert, an academic at Peking University. “The top leader, Donald Trump, is attempting to mobilise the masses to sideline or weaken the elite … reminiscent of events in the country decades past.”
Ever since Trump initiated what's termed Department for Government Efficiency, or the agency, on the Washington bureaucracy early on of his term, numerous Chinese observers have viewed US politics via the perspective of the Cultural Revolution. Whether it is the mobilisation of the youth to execute presidential directives, or cleansing institutions of perceived enemies, the president as viewed from China has brought Mao-style chaos to America, though absent the same levels of violence.
However since the upheaval of the initial period under Trump has calmed, an unfamiliar, different kind of climate has emerged in the country, which in different ways also feels recognizable to numerous Chinese people.
‘The Beacon Has Become Less Bright’
The most profound similarity between Trump’s America and China is the crackdown on open expression.
A former police officer, now a Chinese Communist party dissenter, found himself in the eye of a storm this year, similar to what he once faced in his homeland. Deng has lived in America for several years, after escaping China because of harassment from the authorities.
In September, following the passing of a public figure, he posted that the individual was “despicable”. Like people nationwide – who were fired as a result of making negative comments regarding him – Deng faced a huge backlash. Relatives was doxed and he faced allegations of espionage seeking to divide the US.
“That event was a real shock. I hadn't thought that something like this would occur in the United States – something that typically happens in an authoritarian country,” he commented.
His backlash came from fellow social media users, rather than the state, but that kind of public monitoring bears parallels with the East.
“Regarding targeting dissenters and starting to surveil open discourse about issues deemed controversial … It's appearing here,” noted Maria Repnikova, a scholar at a US university. “This is that you see in the East today as too,” she added, adding that there were now fears in America of pupils informing against educators, a form of surveillance that has been encouraged by the CCP.
Zhang, the legal expert, explained that liberal Chinese intellectuals such as him used to look to America for political inspiration, in part because openly discussing domestic politics in the country is risky. However, “America isn't some kind of god for Chinese liberals. America’s image has declined generally.”
“We used to see America as the symbol of constitutional democracy, but since the new administration, that guide appears dimmer”.
Chinese liberals, typically, at least in private, critical of China’s political system, are increasingly finding it less objectionable than the US's, he stated. “It's somewhat painful to accept this reality … but post-COVID, the government seems to be doing correct policies in environmental protection and promoting EVs and investing in hi-tech,” he noted, while “the West, as represented by the United States, appear in decline.”
The Trump administration’s purchase of stakes in US companies has prompted parallels with the East, where the line between state and private industry is often blurred.
Recently, the US government announced it will take an investor in a startup focused on rare earth processing, following similar stakes in other companies deemed essential for the country's safety. The deals have made certain stakeholders nervous that the US is embarking on a new era of state intervention in private industry.
There are still major differences between the US under Trump and the East. 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 overturned numerous Trump’s actions, something that would be unthinkable in the nation's party-dominated legal system.
An analyst, the founder of Strategy Risks, specializing in China, said: “America could descend into the worst crisis of its history, orders of magnitudes worse than currently, and it would remain more free, open, and liberal than the East under its leader.”
The professor observes that although numerous scholars in the country were shocked to see American colleges yield to official requests regarding DEI policies and open discourse on university grounds, in China, leading institutions are publicly controlled inherently. University leaders, which are appointed by the government, “have no liberty of saying no. They dare not defy orders.”
Still, Americans are starting to adopt measures previously confined to more authoritarian countries. An academic at an American college once vocal on US-China issues refused to speak for this article. He stated: “The truth is, I fear of the censorship here: I actually feel less afraid to criticise Xi these days than say anything bad
