Chinese dissidents who have long looked at the United States as a model for the democracy they want in their own country are growing alarmed at President Donald Trump's rhetoric and actions.
The New York Times reports that several Chinese journalists and activists are drawing parallels between what is happening in the United States now and the infamous "Cultural Revolution" that occurred in China under dictator Mao Zedong in the 1960s and 1970s.
"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," reports the Times. "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."
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These Chinese dissidents have also taken note of the sycophantic language used by Trump cabinet officials and official government social media accounts that appears even more extreme than the Chinese Communist Party's own propaganda.
"Even the CCP’s embassy posts, with all its propaganda, doesn’t spend every single day obsessively praising Xi Jinping,” Deng Haiyan, a critic of the Chinese government, recently observed.
“I’m overwhelmed with a sense of familiarity — it feels so much like China,” Zhang Wenmin, an investigative journalist who left China to live in America two years ago, tells the Times. "I’ve just gotten out of the frying pan and into the fire."