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 Elon Musk has sent to dismantle the U.S. 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 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 United States 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 United States 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,” Wang Jian, a journalist, 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 U.S. Embassy in China.
They’re 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.
“I’m overwhelmed with a sense of familiarity — it feels so much like China,” Zhang Wenmin, an investigative journalist known by her pen name, Jiang Xue, told me. Ms. Zhang was forced to leave China because of her work and moved to the United States in 2023. “I’ve just gotten out of the frying pan and into the fire,” she said.
Of course, the two countries are fundamentally different.
China is a one-party state lacking in three pillars of the American system: liberty, democracy and the rule of law. Millions of Chinese died during the Cultural Revolution, and tens of millions were persecuted. What’s happening in the United States is far from that. “It’s not exactly parallel,” Ian Johnson, an American journalist who has been writing about China for decades, told me. “But historical parallels are never exact because history doesn’t really repeat itself.” The American system is tearing itself apart with no outside pressure, he said, and this is similar to what the Communist Party did at the peak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.
After the Cultural Revolution, which destroyed nearly all institutions in China, the country tried to build something like those American foundations. Despite official restrictions, lawyers, journalists and entrepreneurs built a budding civil society that tried to hold the government accountable.
These are the Chinese who suffered the most when Mr. Xi smothered efforts to make China a more open and democratic society, and they’re also the most disappointed at what’s happening in the United States.
They have been shocked by the abrupt changes in U.S. policy under President Trump. Most striking is the language government agencies have used in social media postings. The tone, people say, sounds like Chinese Communist Party propaganda.
“Even the CCP’s embassy posts, with all its propaganda, doesn’t spend every single day obsessively praising Xi Jinping,” Deng Haiyan, a former police officer turned critic of the Chinese government, wrote on X.
“You’d think People’s Daily had moved into the U.S. Consulate,” he wrote, referring to the official newspaper for the Chinese Communist Party.
The official Weibo account of the U.S. Embassy in China, which has 3.5 million followers, used to be a platform for the U.S. government to spread American values and reliable information. Chinese who share those values would sometimes use the comment sections of the account to vent about their own government.
R. Nicholas Burns, who was the U.S. ambassador in China until January, talked about the importance of using social media to interact with the Chinese public. “One of the major preoccupations of our mission,” he said in a speech in 2023, “is to try to tell the truth about American society, American history, U.S.-China relations to the Chinese people.”
That truth telling, he added, was meant to counter a distorted version of the United States from the Chinese official media. The Weibo account was intended as a Chinese-language bulletin board about American values.
In the past month, many of the embassy’s Weibo posts, which overlap with some of the posts on its X account, were flooded with angry comments from Chinese users expressing disappointment.
“Shame on you!” many Weibo users with IP addresses in China commented on posts about the U.S. policies toward Ukraine.
On a post about remarks Mr. Trump made about human rights, one user wrote: “And you think you’re worthy of talking about human rights? You betrayed Ukraine!”
The changes of both content and style on the Weibo account led one commenter to tease the account’s social media editor: “Blink twice if you’ve been kidnapped.” The embassy press office declined to comment.
For many Chinese, the chaos in Washington is driven by a familiar impulse.
“The only way to dismantle America’s ‘deep state’ is through a ‘Cultural Revolution,’” Zhang Qianfan, a professor of law at Peking University, wrote in a widely circulated article about the erosion of American democracy. “The Cultural Revolution brings neither honesty nor efficiency — only the demolition of the rule of law essential to everyone’s survival.”
The characteristics of authoritarian leaders, such as surrounding themselves with loyalists and trying to control the media, are not unique to China.
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao promoted a semiliterate peasant to the office of vice premier and a low-level cadre at a textile mill to be his deputy at the age of 38.
For his third term, Mr. Xi has surrounded himself with loyalists, many of whom did not go to elite Chinese universities. Neither do they have lengthy experience working in the central government, unlike members of the previous two Chinese administrations.
Last week, when the U.S. Embassy in China posted on its Weibo account that the White House would pick the media outlets allowed to participate in the presidential press pool, a user in the southwestern city Chongqing commented, “Selectively allowing certain media outlets to conduct interviews — such a familiar tactic.”
For Chinese, one of the most astonishing aspects is how fast Mr. Trump seems to be building a cult of personality.
After he showed off hats that said “Trump was right about everything,” a user on X wrote in Chinese: “Mao Zedong of America has been born! Long live the great leader Chairman Trump — long live, long live, long long live!”
Li Weiao, a Beijing-based journalist, posted a video clip on Weibo that shows Mr. Trump enjoying a standing ovation at his first cabinet meeting in his second term. “I think I truly underestimated the dark side of human nature,” he wrote on Weibo.
“The rhythm of this applause feels so familiar,” a lawyer commented on Mr. Li’s post. Another commenter wrote: “Just like North Korea and its friend,” referring to China.
In a comment on an episode of my Chinese-language podcast, a YouTube viewer wrote a parody of a White House announcement in the style of Communist Party propaganda.
“The entire Republican Party and all of America must unite even more closely around the White House Central Committee with President Trump at its core, holding high the great banner of American-style capitalism,” the user wrote. “We must fully implement Trump’s New Era American Capitalism Thought, stay united in purpose, uphold tradition while innovating, forge ahead with determination, and fight tirelessly to achieve the great MAGA goal!”