When Vickie Wang, a rising comedic talent, steps onto the stage in the Big Apple, she is not just thinking about what humor to deliver. She also carefully considers what subjects to avoid. “I refrain from openly criticizing the administration,” she explained. Or if she ventures there, she makes certain it's not recorded for online platforms. “I would never publish openly material where I directly criticize the government … I think this is a learned behavior from China.”
The comedian, thirty-nine, resided in the Chinese metropolis for almost a decade, departing in that year. In 2025, she relocated to the US. When she got there, she dove into an intense period of “overindulging on freedom,” going to talks, demonstrations, and delving into the city's library system.
But over the past year since Donald Trump returned to office again, there's been a noticeable shift in the atmosphere, she says. “In China, I knew where the line was, while here I'm standing on shifting sands.”
Her fears mirror an emerging political reality in the US which numerous individuals from China, or people with experience in China, perceive as disturbingly familiar. Enemies face exclusion. The leader demands absolute loyalty. Journalists are targeted. Establishments are attacked.
The president has openly expressed about his admiration for Xi Jinping, China’s strongman leader. He has described him as a “great guy”. When they reached a brief ceasefire in economic tensions recently, the bonhomie between the two leaders of countries with vastly different governance models was evident. And after decades of optimism in the US that improved relations with China could assist the rising power to liberalise, under Trump 2.0, it seems as if the US is being pulled in the Chinese direction, rather than the other way around.
“The United States is undergoing an era of cultural revolution,” stated a constitutional law expert, an academic at Peking University. “The president, Donald Trump, is attempting to mobilise the grassroots in order to marginalize or undermine established figures … similar to events in China decades past.”
Since Trump unleashed what's termed a government streamlining body, or Doge, on the Washington bureaucracy at the start in office, numerous Chinese observers see American governance via the perspective of China's historical period. Be it the mobilisation of the youth to carry out the leader’s will, or cleansing organizations of perceived enemies, the president as viewed from China has delivered Mao-style chaos to America, though absent the same levels of violence.
But since the turmoil of the initial period under Trump has calmed, a new, different kind of climate has emerged in the country, which in different ways seems familiar to numerous Chinese individuals.
‘The Lighthouse Has Become Less Bright’
The deepest similarity between Trump’s America and the East is the crackdown on free speech.
A former police officer, now a Chinese Communist party dissenter, ended up in a controversy this year, similar to what he’d only previously experienced in his homeland. Deng resided in America since 2019, having fled China because of harassment from the authorities.
In September, after the death of a public figure, he posted that Kirk was “despicable”. Similar to others across the US – who were fired as a result of making negative comments regarding him – he encountered a huge backlash. Relatives was doxed and he faced allegations of espionage seeking to divide the US.
“That event surprised me deeply. I hadn't thought such a thing would occur in America – something that should only happen in a repressive state,” he commented.
Deng’s pile on came from online peers, rather than the government, but that kind of public monitoring also has similarities with the East.
“In terms of going after dissenters and starting to surveil open discourse on topics deemed controversial … It's appearing here,” noted an academic, a scholar at a US university. “That’s something observed in China today as too,” she said, adding that concerns are rising in the US of students reporting on teachers, a type of monitoring promoted by Chinese authorities.
Zhang, the legal expert, explained that liberal Chinese intellectuals like himself once turned to the US for political inspiration, in part because public debate on internal affairs in China is risky. But now, “America is no longer some kind of ideal for Chinese liberals. America’s image has declined generally.”
“We once viewed America as the symbol of democratic governance, but after Trump took power, that guide seems to have become less luminous”.
Progressive Chinese, who are often, behind closed doors, skeptical about China’s political system, are increasingly finding it less objectionable than America’s, Zhang said. “It's somewhat painful to accept this … but after the pandemic, authorities appears to be pursuing the right thing in environmental protection and promoting EVs and tech investment,” he noted, while “the West, exemplified by the United States, seems to be declining.”
The Trump administration’s purchase of shares in US companies has also drawn comparisons with the East, where the distinction between government and private industry is often blurred.
On Monday, the US government stated it would become a shareholder in a new company focused on mineral refinement, following comparable shares in other companies it considers vital to the country's safety. The deals have left certain stakeholders nervous that the US is entering a new era of state intervention in the private sector.
There are still significant distinctions between Trump’s America and China. Last month, multiple media outlets among others refused to sign to a defense department rule that demanded reporting solely on approved news. US courts have blocked or reversed numerous Trump’s actions, an action that would be impossible in the nation's CCP-controlled judiciary.
Isaac Stone Fish, who established of a consulting firm, a China-focused advisory firm, commented: “The United States could descend into its gravest challenge of all time, orders of magnitudes worse than currently, and it would remain freer, more open, and liberal than China under Xi.”
Zhang notes that while numerous scholars in China were shocked to see American colleges capitulate to government demands regarding DEI policies and free speech on campus, in China, the top universities are all state-owned by default. Administrators, which are appointed by the state, “have no liberty of saying no. They can’t afford to be disobedient.”
Nevertheless, people in the US are beginning to adopt measures that were once confined to repressive regimes. One professor at a US university who was previously vocal on US-China issues declined to speak for this article. He stated: “The truth is, I am scared of the censorship here: I actually feel more comfortable to criticise Xi now than say anything bad
