When Vickie Wang, an emerging performer, steps onto her platform in the Big Apple, she's not only thinking about what humor to tell. She also weighs what subjects to avoid. “I don't engage in directly attacking the government,” she stated. Or if she does, she ensures it isn't recorded for online platforms. “I'd never publish openly content where I directly criticize the government … I believe it's a habit from China.”
Wang, thirty-nine, resided in Shanghai for nearly a decade, leaving in that year. In 2025, she moved to the US. When she got there, she embarked on an intense period of “revenge bingeing on democracy,” attending talks, protests, and delving into the city's public library.
However over the past year since the president was elected again, there has been a noticeable shift in the atmosphere, she notes. “Back home, I understood the boundaries, whereas in the US I find myself on shifting sands.”
Wang’s concerns reflect an emerging political reality in America which numerous individuals from China, or people with experience in the country, find eerily familiar. Opponents are ostracised. The leader demands absolute loyalty. Journalists are targeted. Institutions come under fire.
The president has openly expressed about his admiration for Xi Jinping, China’s strongman leader. He has described him as “fantastic”. When they reached a temporary truce in economic tensions recently, the bonhomie between the two leaders of countries with vastly different political systems was evident. Following years of hope in America that closer ties with China may help the rising power to liberalise, in the current administration, it appears as if the US is shifting in the Chinese direction, instead of vice versa.
“The United States is undergoing an era of societal upheaval,” stated a constitutional law expert, an academic at Peking University. “The top leader, Trump, is attempting to mobilise the grassroots in order to marginalize or undermine established figures … reminiscent of what happened in China half a century ago.”
Ever since the administration unleashed what's termed Department for Government Efficiency, or Doge, on the Washington bureaucracy early on of his term, many in China 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 institutions of perceived enemies, Trump as viewed from China has delivered Mao-style chaos to the US, albeit absent equivalent degrees of violence.
But after the upheaval of the early months of the new administration has calmed, a new, distinct type of political atmosphere has settled in the country, which in different ways seems recognizable to many Chinese people.
‘The Lighthouse Has Become Dimmer’
The deepest similarity between the US today and China is the suppression on open expression.
A former police officer, turned CCP critic, ended up in the eye of a storm this year, similar to what he’d only previously experienced in China. He has lived in America since 2019, having fled China due to harassment from the authorities.
In September, after the death of Charlie Kirk, he posted that Kirk was “despicable”. Similar to others across the US – who were fired for expressing criticism regarding him – he encountered a huge backlash. His family was doxed and he was accused of espionage seeking to divide the US.
“That event was a real shock. I hadn't thought such a thing would occur in America – what typically happens in a repressive state,” Deng said.
Deng’s backlash originated from fellow social media users, rather than the state, but such of public monitoring bears parallels with the East.
“Regarding targeting dissenters and monitoring open discourse on topics deemed controversial … It's appearing here,” said an academic, an associate professor at Georgia State University. “That’s something observed in China today as well,” she added, stating that concerns are rising in the US of pupils informing against teachers, a type of monitoring that has been encouraged by the CCP.
The professor, the Peking University law professor, said that liberal Chinese intellectuals such as him used to look to the US for ideals, since public debate on internal affairs in China is dangerous. But now, “America isn't a ideal for progressive Chinese. The US's reputation has worsened across the board.”
“We used to see the US as the symbol of constitutional democracy, but after Trump took power, that guide seems to have become less luminous”.
Chinese liberals, typically, behind closed doors, critical of the nation's governance, now perceive it more acceptable than America’s, he stated. “It’s sort of painful to accept this reality … but after the pandemic, the government seems to be doing correct policies in improving the environment and developing electric cars and tech investment,” he noted, while “Western nations, exemplified by America, seems to be declining.”
The Trump administration’s purchase of shares in American firms has also drawn comparisons with the East, where the line between state and business is often blurred.
Recently, authorities announced it will take an investor in a startup specialising in mineral refinement, after taking comparable shares in other companies it considers vital to national security. The deals have made certain stakeholders nervous that America is embarking on a new era of government meddling in the private sector.
There are still major differences between the US under Trump and China. Last month, multiple media outlets among others declined to agree to a Pentagon policy that demanded reporting solely on government-authorised information. US courts have blocked or reversed numerous Trump’s actions, something that would be impossible in the nation's party-dominated legal system.
Isaac Stone Fish, the founder of a consulting firm, specializing in China, said: “The United States might face its gravest challenge of its history, orders of magnitudes worse than it is now, and it will still be freer, open, and more liberal than China under Xi.”
The professor observes that although numerous scholars in China were surprised to see US universities capitulate to official requests regarding DEI policies and free speech on university grounds, in the East, the top universities are publicly controlled inherently. University leaders, which are appointed by the state, “have no liberty refuse. They can’t afford to be disobedient.”
Still, Americans are beginning to take precautions that were once confined to more authoritarian countries. One professor at an American college once outspoken on bilateral matters declined to speak for this piece. He said: “The truth is, I am scared of the censorship in the US: I genuinely feel less afraid criticizing China's leader these days than say anything bad
