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.