- Aug 3, 2012
- 29,029
- 28,584
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Christian
- Marital Status
- Married
- Politics
- US-Democrat
Many have made comparisons between Trump and two well-known autocrats from the 1930's-40's, but a new one is making the rounds now: Trump and Mao. It's more novel (at least to me), but also strikes me as being potentially more accurate, with Mao's emphasis on personalist propaganda; his purging and destruction of elite institutions; his revenge after losing and then returning to power; and his exaltation of rural life physical labor over urban life and the knowledge economy.
www.nytimes.com
www.project-syndicate.org
Many Chinese See a Cultural Revolution in America
People in China are expressing alarm at what looks like a familiar authoritarian turn in the United States, their longtime role model for democracy.
MAGA Maoism | by J. Bradford DeLong - Project Syndicate
J. Bradford DeLong finds disturbing parallels between today's Republicans and Chinese Communists during the Cultural Revolution.
www.project-syndicate.org
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.”
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.”
