When Vickie Wang, an emerging comedic talent, takes the stage in the Big Apple, she's not just considering what humor to deliver. Additionally, she carefully considers which topics to avoid. “I don't engage in directly criticizing the administration,” she explained. And when she does, she makes certain it isn't recorded for online platforms. “I would never publish openly material where I directly criticize the government … I think this is a learned behavior acquired back home.”
The comedian, thirty-nine, lived in Shanghai for almost ten years, departing in 2022. In 2025, she relocated to the US. Upon arrival, she dove into an intense period of “overindulging on freedom,” attending talks, protests, and exploring the city's library system.
But in the year after the president was elected for the second time, there has been a noticeable shift in the environment, she notes. “In China, I knew where the line was, whereas here I'm standing on shifting sands.”
Wang’s concerns mirror an emerging climate in the US which many Chinese, or people with experience in the country, perceive as eerily familiar. Opponents are ostracised. The leader expects absolute loyalty. Journalists face scrutiny. Establishments are attacked.
Trump has openly expressed about his admiration for Xi Jinping, the nation's authoritarian figure. He has described him as a “great guy”. When they reached a brief ceasefire in the trade war on Thursday, the bonhomie between the two leaders of countries with vastly different governance models was evident. And after decades of optimism in the US that closer ties with the East may help the rising power to liberalise, under Trump 2.0, it appears as if the US is being pulled in China's path, rather than vice versa.
“America is experiencing a period of cultural revolution,” stated a constitutional law expert, an academic at Peking University. “The top leader, Trump, is trying to mobilise the grassroots to marginalize or undermine the elite … similar to events in the country decades past.”
Since the administration initiated the so-called Department for Government Efficiency, or Doge, on the Washington bureaucracy early on in office, numerous Chinese observers see American governance via the perspective of the Cultural Revolution. Be it the rallying of the youth to execute the leader’s will, or purging organizations of those deemed opposition, the president from a Chinese viewpoint has delivered Mao-style chaos to America, albeit absent equivalent degrees of violence.
But since the upheaval of the early months of the new administration subsided, an unfamiliar, different kind of political atmosphere has emerged in the country, which variously seems recognizable to numerous Chinese people.
‘The Beacon Has Become Dimmer’
The most profound similarity between Trump’s America and the East is the crackdown on open expression.
Deng Haiyan, turned Chinese Communist party critic, ended up in the eye of a storm recently, the likes of which he once faced in China. Deng resided in the US for several years, having fled the country because of harassment from officials.
In September, after the death of Charlie Kirk, Deng tweeted that the individual was “despicable”. Similar to others nationwide – who were fired as a result of making negative comments about Kirk – he encountered significant backlash. Relatives was doxed and he was accused of espionage attempting to create division.
“This incident was a real shock. I never imagined such a thing would occur in the United States – something that typically happens in an authoritarian country,” he commented.
His pile on originated from online peers, instead of the government, but that kind of public monitoring bears similarities with the East.
“In terms of going after dissenters and monitoring open discourse on topics deemed controversial … It's appearing here,” noted an academic, an associate professor at Georgia State University. “That’s something that you see in the East today as well,” she added, stating that there were now fears in the US of pupils informing against teachers, a type of surveillance promoted by the CCP.
The professor, the legal expert, explained that progressive thinkers like himself once turned to America for ideals, in part because public debate on domestic politics in the country is dangerous. However, “The US is no longer some kind of god for Chinese liberals. The US's reputation has worsened generally.”
“We once viewed America as the beacon of constitutional democracy, but after Trump took power, this lighthouse seems to have become dimmer”.
Chinese liberals, who are often, at least in private, skeptical about the nation's governance, are increasingly finding it less objectionable than America’s, he stated. “It’s sort of difficult to acknowledge this … but after the pandemic, authorities seems to be doing the right thing in environmental protection and developing electric cars and investing in hi-tech,” Zhang said, while “the West, as represented by America, seems to be in decline.”
The Trump administration’s purchase 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 would become a shareholder in a startup specialising in mineral refinement, after taking similar stakes in additional firms deemed essential for national security. These moves have left certain stakeholders nervous that the US is embarking on a fresh phase of state intervention in the private sector.
Yet, there remain major differences between the US under Trump and China. Last month, multiple media outlets including the Guardian declined to agree to a Pentagon policy that required they only report on government-authorised news. US courts have blocked or overturned many of Trump’s actions, something that is impossible in the nation's CCP-controlled judiciary.
An analyst, who established of a consulting firm, a China-focused advisory firm, commented: “America could descend into the worst crisis of all time, orders of magnitudes worse than currently, and it will still be more free, more open, and more liberal than China under Xi.”
Zhang observes that while many intellectuals in the country were surprised to see US universities yield to government demands regarding diversity and inclusion practices and open discourse on campus, in China, the top universities are all state-owned inherently. University leaders, who are appointed by the government, “have no liberty of saying no. They dare not to be disobedient.”
Still, Americans are beginning to take precautions that were once associated with repressive regimes. An academic at an American college once vocal on US-China issues refused to speak for this piece. He said: “Honestly, I fear of the censorship here: I genuinely feel less afraid criticizing China's leader these days than say anything bad
