When Vickie Wang, an emerging comedic talent, takes her platform in the Big Apple, she is not just thinking about which jokes to tell. She also weighs what subjects to steer clear of. “I refrain from directly attacking the administration,” she explained. Or if she does, she ensures it's not recorded for social media. “I would never publicly share content in which I openly disparage the government … I think this is a habit from China.”
The comedian, 39, lived in Shanghai for almost a decade, departing in 2022. In 2025, she relocated to the US. When she got there, she embarked on an intense period of “overindulging on democracy,” attending talks, protests, and exploring New York’s public library.
But over the past year after Donald Trump returned to office for the second time, there has been a noticeable shift in the atmosphere, she notes. “In China, I understood the boundaries, whereas in the US I'm standing on shifting sands.”
Her fears mirror an emerging political reality in the US which many Chinese, or people with experience in the country, find disturbingly similar. Enemies face exclusion. The president expects absolute loyalty. Journalists face scrutiny. Establishments are attacked.
Trump has not been shy about his admiration for China's leader, the nation's authoritarian figure. He has described Xi as a “great guy”. When they reached a brief ceasefire in the trade war recently, the bonhomie between both figures of countries with vastly different political systems was evident. Following years of hope in America that closer ties with the East may help the growing nation become more open, in the current administration, it appears that the US is being pulled in China's path, rather than vice versa.
“America is experiencing a period of societal upheaval,” stated a constitutional law expert, a professor at a top Chinese university. “The president, Trump, is trying to rally the grassroots to sideline or weaken the elite … reminiscent of what happened in the country half a century ago.”
Since Trump unleashed what's termed a government streamlining body, or Doge, on federal institutions early on of his term, numerous Chinese observers have viewed US politics through the lens of the Cultural Revolution. Be it the mobilisation of young people to carry out the leader’s will, or purging organizations of those deemed opposition, the president from a Chinese viewpoint has brought Mao-style chaos to America, though without equivalent degrees of violence.
But after the turmoil of the initial period under Trump subsided, an unfamiliar, different kind of climate has settled in the country, which in different ways seems familiar to numerous Chinese individuals.
‘The Beacon Has Become Dimmer’
The most profound parallel 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, the likes of which he once faced in China. Deng resided in America since 2019, after escaping the country due to harassment from the authorities.
Last fall, after the death of a public figure, he posted that the individual was a “scumbag”. Similar to others across the US – who were fired for making negative comments regarding him – Deng faced a huge backlash. Relatives was doxed and he faced allegations of espionage seeking to divide the US.
“That event was a real shock. I never imagined that something like this would occur in the United States – what should only happen in a repressive state,” he commented.
Deng’s backlash originated from fellow social media users, instead of the state, but such of public monitoring bears similarities with China.
“Regarding going after dissenters and starting to surveil open discourse about issues that are sensitive … It's appearing in the US,” noted an academic, an associate professor at Georgia State University. “This is that you see in the East today as too,” she added, stating that there were now fears in America of pupils informing against teachers, a form of surveillance promoted by Chinese authorities.
The professor, the Peking University law professor, said that liberal Chinese intellectuals such as him once turned to America for political inspiration, in part because openly discussing internal affairs in China is dangerous. However, “America is no longer some kind of ideal for Chinese liberals. America’s image has worsened across the board.”
“We once viewed the US as the symbol of constitutional democracy, but since the new administration, this lighthouse appears less luminous”.
Chinese liberals, who are often, behind closed doors, skeptical about the nation's governance, are increasingly finding it more acceptable than the US's, he stated. “It’s sort of difficult to acknowledge this … but post-COVID, authorities appears to be pursuing the right thing in improving the environment and promoting EVs and tech investment,” he noted, while “Western nations, as represented by the United States, appear declining.”
The government's purchase of shares in US companies has also drawn parallels with the East, where the line between government and business is frequently unclear.
On Monday, the US government stated it would become an investor in a new company focused on rare earth processing, after taking similar stakes in additional firms it considers essential for the country's safety. These moves have made certain stakeholders nervous that the US is entering a fresh phase of state intervention in private industry.
There are still major differences between Trump’s America and the East. In October, several news organisations among others declined to agree to a Pentagon policy that required they only report on approved news. US courts have blocked or reversed many of Trump’s actions, something that would be unthinkable in China’s CCP-controlled legal system.
An analyst, the founder of a consulting firm, specializing in China, 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 freer, open, and liberal than the East under its leader.”
Zhang observes that although many intellectuals in the country were shocked to see American colleges yield to government demands concerning DEI policies and open discourse on campus, in the East, the top universities are publicly controlled by default. University leaders, which are appointed by the state, “cannot of saying no. They can’t afford defy orders.”
Nevertheless, Americans are starting to take precautions that were once associated with repressive regimes. An academic at an American college once vocal on US-China issues refused to be interviewed for this article. He said: “The truth is, I am scared of suppression in the US: I genuinely feel more comfortable to criticise Xi these days than say anything bad
