As Vickie Wang, a rising performer, takes the stage in the Big Apple, she is not just thinking about what humor to deliver. Additionally, she weighs which topics to avoid. “I refrain from directly attacking the administration,” she explained. Or if she does, she ensures it's not captured for social media. “I would never publicly share content where I directly criticize the government … I think it's a habit from China.”
Wang, thirty-nine, lived in the Chinese metropolis for almost ten years, departing in 2022. In 2025, she relocated to America. Upon arrival, she embarked on a frenzy of “overindulging on freedom,” going to lectures, demonstrations, and exploring New York’s library system.
But in the year after Donald Trump was elected for the second time, there has been a noticeable shift in the environment, she says. “In China, I understood the boundaries, while in the US I find myself on shifting sands.”
Her fears reflect a new climate in America which many Chinese, or those who have lived in China, perceive as eerily familiar. Enemies face exclusion. The leader expects total allegiance. Journalists face scrutiny. Institutions are attacked.
The president has not been shy about his admiration for China's leader, the nation's strongman leader. He's called him as “fantastic”. When they reached a temporary truce in the trade war recently, the camaraderie between both figures of countries with vastly different governance models became clear. Following years of hope in America that closer ties with China may help the growing nation to liberalise, under Trump 2.0, it seems that America is shifting in the Chinese direction, rather than the other way around.
“The United States is experiencing a period of cultural revolution,” said Zhang Qianfan, an academic at Peking University. “The top leader, Trump, is trying to rally the masses in order to sideline or undermine the elite … reminiscent of what happened in the country half a century ago.”
Since the administration initiated the so-called Department for Government Efficiency, or the agency, on the Washington bureaucracy at the start of his term, numerous Chinese observers see American governance via the perspective of the Cultural Revolution. Be it the mobilisation of young people to carry out the leader’s will, or purging institutions of perceived enemies, the president as viewed from China has brought disorder reminiscent of Mao to the US, though absent the same levels of violence.
But since the turmoil of the early months under Trump subsided, a new, different kind of climate has emerged in the US, which in different ways also feels familiar to numerous Chinese individuals.
‘The Lighthouse Is Less Bright’
The most profound similarity between Trump’s America and the East is the suppression on open expression.
A former police officer, turned Chinese Communist party critic, found himself in the eye of a storm recently, similar to what he’d only previously experienced in China. Deng resided in America since 2019, after escaping the country due to harassment from the authorities.
In September, after the death of Charlie Kirk, he posted that the individual was a “scumbag”. Like people across the US – who were fired for making negative comments about Kirk – he encountered a huge backlash. Relatives had personal info leaked and he was accused of espionage attempting to create division.
“This incident was a real shock. I hadn't thought such a thing would occur in America – what should only happen in an authoritarian country,” he commented.
Deng’s backlash originated from fellow social media users, instead of the state, but that kind of social surveillance bears similarities with the East.
“In terms of going after those who disagree and monitoring public speech about issues that are sensitive … It's appearing in the US,” said an academic, an associate professor at Georgia State University. “That’s something that you see in the East today as too,” she added, adding that there were now fears in the US of pupils informing against teachers, a form of monitoring that has been encouraged by Chinese authorities.
The professor, the legal expert, said that liberal Chinese intellectuals such as him used to look to the US for political inspiration, in part because openly discussing internal affairs in the country is risky. But now, “The US isn't some kind of ideal for Chinese liberals. America’s image has declined generally.”
“We used to see the US as the beacon of democratic governance, but since the new administration, this lighthouse seems to have become less luminous”.
Chinese liberals, who are often, at least in private, critical of the nation's governance, now perceive it less objectionable than the US's, he stated. “It's somewhat difficult to acknowledge this … but post-COVID, the government seems to be doing the right thing in improving the environment and developing electric cars and investing in hi-tech,” he noted, while “the West, as represented by the United States, appear in decline.”
The government's acquisition of shares in American firms has prompted comparisons with the East, where the line between government and private industry is often blurred.
On Monday, the US government stated it would become an investor in a startup specialising in rare earth processing, after taking comparable shares in other companies deemed vital to the country's safety. These moves have left some investors nervous that the US is embarking on a fresh phase of government meddling in private industry.
Yet, there remain major differences between Trump’s America and the East. Last month, multiple media outlets among others refused to sign to a Pentagon policy that required reporting solely on government-authorised information. American judiciary have halted or reversed numerous Trump’s actions, an action that is unthinkable in the nation's party-dominated judiciary.
An analyst, the founder of a consulting firm, specializing in China, commented: “The United States might face the worst crisis of its history, orders of magnitudes worse than currently, and it will still be freer, open, and more liberal than China under Xi.”
Zhang observes that although many intellectuals in the country were shocked to see American colleges yield to official requests regarding DEI policies and free speech on university grounds, in the East, leading institutions are all state-owned inherently. University leaders, who are appointed by the government, “cannot of saying no. They dare not defy orders.”
Nevertheless, people in the US are beginning to adopt measures that were once associated with repressive regimes. An academic at a US university who was previously vocal on bilateral matters refused to speak for this article. He stated: “The truth is, I am scared of the censorship here: I genuinely feel less afraid to criticise Xi now than say anything bad
