Is the second Trump Administration turning America into Maoist China? That was the New York Times’ assessment in "Many Chinese See a Cultural Revolution in America," to judge from a piece by Li Yuan that appeared in the paper’s March 10 edition. Yuan made the very serious, if content-free, assertion that the President Donald Trump shares many parallels with China’s Communist revolutionary dictator Mao Zedong, who killed tens of millions of his own people. Apparently, she failed to notice, if that were the case, what a limb she would have been going out on to even write such an article in the regime of such a despot.
Yuan claimed that “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.”
She stated that many Chinese had long looked to America as a role model they wished their country would more closely follow, but vaguely claimed “Now for some Chinese, the United States is looking more and more like China.”
She then quoted a cherry-picked selection of Chinese social media comments, accusing Trump of “the pursuit of power,” and being a “president who calls himself a king,” eulogizing America as “beacon of democracy, 1776-2025,” and commenting “you’d think [official Chinese Communist Party Newspaper] People’s Daily had moved into the U.S. Consulate,” as though these random people’s unsubstantiated assertions somehow demonstrated her point.
She went on to quote a Chinese law professor who accused Trump of trying to spark his own “cultural revolution,” but offered no explanation of how anything Trump did was in any way parallel to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which millions perished while Western music, literature, and other art was banned in the name of preserving the purity of Chinese socialism.
She also vaguely stated that many Chinese were alarmed by Trump’s “cult of personality,” as though that, too, was a distinctive parallel. She also made much of another Chinese social media user who commented on Trump receiving a standing ovation from his cabinet, “I think we underestimated the dark side of human nature,” to which someone else had responded, “The rhythm of this applause feels so familiar,” whatever that was supposed to mean.
As though this were the clincher, Yuan then quoted a comment on her own podcast: a parody of Trump laying out his agenda, styled as a Chinese Communist propaganda piece.
Yuan did graciously make a hasty admission that the parallels were not exact, quoting Ian Johnson, an American journalist stationed in China, who had pointed out that “China is a one-party state lacking in three pillars of the American system: liberty, democracy and the rule of law. Millions of Chinese died during the Cultural Revolution, and tens of millions were persecuted. What’s happening in the United States is far from that.” In fact, more precisely, Mao had killed an estimated total of sixty to eighty million of his own people, which would almost certainly have made him numerically the greatest mass-murderer the world has ever seen.
So, one was arguably the most bloodthirsty tyrant the world had ever seen, while the other had just got a standing ovation from his cabinet and garnered some negative social media comments from people who didn’t like him, So, again, not a 100 percent perfect parallel, But, hey, whatever, close enough for the New York Times.
