When Vickie Wang, an emerging comedic talent, steps onto her platform in New York, she is not only considering what humor to tell. Additionally, she weighs which topics to steer clear of. “I refrain from directly criticizing the administration,” she explained. Or if she ventures there, she makes certain it's not recorded for social media. “I'd never publish openly material in which I directly criticize authorities … I think it's a habit from China.”
Wang, 39, resided in the Chinese metropolis for almost ten years, departing in 2022. By 2025, she moved to America. When she got there, she dove into a frenzy of “overindulging on democracy,” attending talks, demonstrations, and delving into the city's public library.
But over the past year since Donald Trump was elected again, there has been a noticeable shift in the environment, she says. “In China, I knew where the line was, while in the US I find myself on shifting sands.”
Her concerns mirror an emerging climate in the US which many Chinese, or people with experience in the country, find eerily similar. Enemies face exclusion. The leader demands absolute loyalty. Reporters face scrutiny. Institutions come under fire.
The president has not been shy about his admiration for Xi Jinping, the nation's authoritarian figure. He's called Xi as a “great guy”. As they agreed a temporary truce in the trade war recently, the camaraderie between both figures of countries with vastly different political systems was evident. And after decades of optimism in America that closer ties with China could assist the growing nation to liberalise, under Trump 2.0, it seems that America is being pulled in China's path, instead of vice versa.
“America is undergoing a period of cultural revolution,” stated a constitutional law expert, an academic at a top Chinese university. “The president, Donald Trump, is attempting to mobilise the grassroots in order to marginalize or undermine the elite … similar to events in the country half a century ago.”
Ever since the administration initiated what's termed Department for Government Efficiency, or Doge, on the Washington bureaucracy at the start of his term, many in China have viewed American governance through the lens of China's historical period. Be it the rallying of young people to carry out the leader’s will, or purging institutions of those deemed opposition, Trump as viewed from China has delivered Mao-style chaos to the US, albeit absent the same levels of violence.
However since the turmoil of the early months of the new administration subsided, an unfamiliar, different kind of political atmosphere has settled in the US, which variously also feels familiar to many Chinese individuals.
‘The Beacon Has Become Dimmer’
The most profound similarity between the US today and China is the suppression on free speech.
A former police officer, now a CCP dissenter, ended up in the eye of a storm recently, similar to what he’d only previously experienced in his homeland. Deng has lived in the US since 2019, after escaping the country because of harassment from officials.
Last fall, following the passing of Charlie Kirk, he posted that Kirk was a “scumbag”. Like people across the US – who were fired as a result of making negative comments about Kirk – Deng faced significant backlash. His family had personal info leaked and he was accused of espionage seeking 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 an authoritarian country,” Deng said.
His pile on originated from fellow social media users, rather than the government, but such of social surveillance bears parallels with China.
“In terms of targeting dissenters and monitoring public speech on topics deemed controversial … It's appearing here,” said Maria Repnikova, a scholar at Georgia State University. “This is observed in the East now as well,” she said, stating that concerns are rising in America of pupils informing against educators, a type of surveillance promoted by the CCP.
Zhang, the Peking University law professor, explained that progressive thinkers such as him once turned to the US for political inspiration, in part because openly discussing domestic politics in the country is dangerous. However, “The US is no longer some kind of ideal for Chinese liberals. The US's reputation has declined generally.”
“We used to see America as the beacon of constitutional democracy, but after Trump took power, this lighthouse appears less luminous”.
Chinese liberals, typically, behind closed doors, skeptical about the nation's governance, are increasingly finding it less objectionable than America’s, he stated. “It's somewhat painful to accept this … but after the pandemic, the government seems to be doing the right thing in environmental protection and developing electric cars and investing in hi-tech,” he noted, while “Western nations, exemplified by America, seems to be declining.”
The Trump administration’s acquisition of shares in US companies has prompted parallels with China, where the distinction between government and private industry is frequently unclear.
Recently, authorities announced it will take an investor in a startup specialising in rare earth processing, after taking comparable shares in other companies deemed essential for national security. The deals have left some investors concerned that the US is embarking on a new era of government meddling in private industry.
Yet, there remain significant distinctions 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 government-authorised information. US courts have halted or reversed many of presidential measures, an action that is unthinkable in China’s CCP-controlled judiciary.
An analyst, the founder of Strategy Risks, a China-focused advisory firm, said: “The United States could descend into the worst crisis of its history, orders of magnitudes worse than it is now, and it will still be more free, open, and liberal than the East under its leader.”
The professor notes that although numerous scholars in the country were surprised to see American colleges capitulate to official requests regarding diversity and inclusion practices and free speech on campus, in the East, the top universities are all state-owned inherently. Administrators, which are selected by the state, “have no liberty of saying no. They can’t afford to be disobedient.”
Nevertheless, Americans are starting to take precautions previously associated with repressive regimes. An academic at a US university once outspoken on bilateral matters refused to be interviewed for this article. He said: “The truth is, I fear of the censorship in the US: I genuinely feel more comfortable to criticise Xi now than say anything bad
