When rare protests flared in China in 2022, one slogan read: “We want reform, not a Cultural Revolution.” It alluded to complaints that the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, was behaving in an increasingly Mao-esque manner. His extraordinary dominance over his party, political repression, tight social controls and burgeoning personality cult all lent themselves to comparison with the man who ruled China for decades.
Yet Xi is committed to order and discipline, exerting authority through the organs of the Communist party. Mao Zedong relished disruption and turned to the power of the masses. That’s why, increasingly, many in China are comparing Mao to another modern-day leader. Despite the ferocity of Donald Trump’s trade war, they are perhaps just as shocked by what he is doing to his own country. They see a proud nation felled not by an external threat, but by the unbridled ego of the man at the top – a vengeful, anarchic force who uses dramatic rhetoric to whip up the mob and destroy institutions, and unpredictability to reinforce his power. It looks awfully familiar.
In one widely circulated essay on US politics, the legal scholar Zhang Qianfan calls it “America’s Cultural Revolution”. Instead of tightly controlling everything, as Xi and other strongmen prefer, Trump sees opportunities in upheaval. Like Mao, preparing to unleash the Cultural Revolution almost 60 years ago, he appears to believe that a brighter future will be reached through “great disorder under heaven”.
Obviously, the analogy can only go so far. The decade-long Cultural Revolution saw perhaps 2 million people killed or hounded to their deaths and tens of millions persecuted in acts of extraordinary cruelty. It destroyed much of China’s culture, closed schools and universities, silenced its greatest thinkers and tore families apart. No one elected Mao, and without a palace coup there was no way to remove him. The US has powerful checks and balances and free speech protections. This is about resonance, not repetition.
But even before Trump won office, the writer Jiayang Fan noted the two men’s “polemical excess and xenophobic paranoia”. In 2017, the sinologist Geremie Barmé’s lengthy comparison argued that Mao too “portrayed himself as an outsider who championed an uprising of the masses against a sclerotic system”.
As I researched Red Memory, my book on how the Cultural Revolution still shapes and scars China, Trump’s uncanny ability to channel the public’s id felt disconcertingly familiar. Like Mao, he amplifies political power by dividing where other leaders promise to unite. Mao said that the “most important question” of the revolution was: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?” The rhetoric of division has been central to rallying support for Trump, and he portrays an “enemy from within, [which] in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all those countries”.
The revolutionary nature of Trump’s second term only strengthens the case. Mao launched the Cultural Revolution after his disastrous Great Leap Forward: a hubristic economic plan that led to as many as 45 million deaths from famine before more pragmatic figures reined him in. He wanted revenge and the removal of doubters unwilling to pursue his next implausible goal. “We can observe a purer Trump exactly as [the Cultural Revolution] revealed a purer Mao,” writes Michel Bonnin, a leading expert on the Cultural Revolution. The president, too, has shaken off restraints.
Many on the right loathe these comparisons, however qualified, and not only because of the era’s brutality or the shock of seeing their hero compared to China’s most famous communist. They (and, in fairness, some Chinese survivors) argue that the Cultural Revolution is better compared to US campus protests in recent years, casting intolerant students as modern Red Guards.
But even if you share their disapproval of protesters, the comparison doesn’t hold. The Red Guards were Mao’s means to Mao’s end, born of his cult and able to run riot only with his support and encouragement. As Prof Zhang writes in his essay: “Essentially, the Cultural Revolution means the supreme leader orchestrating a mass movement … harnessing ordinary citizens to root out disobedient elites.”
The document launching the Cultural Revolution warned that (counter-revolutionary) “revisionists” had “sneaked into the party, the government, the army, and various cultural circles”. The Trump administration rails against “revisionists” (of the left) who have gained influence within national institutions. Trump has replaced seasoned professionals with destructive ideologues, rendering parts of the state unable to function. His dislike of experts recalls an era in which loyalty and political attitude – “redness” – were more important than technical knowhow. We are urged to “trust the president’s instincts” as the global economy shudders. Chinese citizens were once told to “just follow” Mao’s instructions, including “those we fail to understand for the moment”.
Leaders around Mao were often startled to learn his intentions from state media; Trump’s cabinet is caught out by Truth Social posts. Like Mao, Trump makes ambiguous or contradictory statements, then sits back and watches underlings take chunks out of each other. He’s even showing a hitherto undetected interest in culture, taking over the Kennedy Center (though Melania, as yet, shows no desire to produce Trumpist model operas).
What lessons might the US take from one of the grimmest parts of Chinese history? The first is that Mao was able to wreak havoc because those around him feared his often lethal wrath and did not fully comprehend his vision’s extremity until it was too late. Republicans, business leaders and others can challenge Trump, yet still choose not to do so.
The second is that nothing lasts for ever. The Cultural Revolution limped to a close with Mao’s death in 1976. What followed was an extraordinary social, cultural, economic and even political flourishing. While democratic impulses were never allowed to take root, traces of that era’s hope and creativity endure to this day, despite Beijing’s best efforts.
If that can happen even in a one-party system then perhaps, post-Trumpism, something better awaits. Yet China is still paying the political, social and psychological price for Mao’s folly and ruthlessness. The longer such a campaign rages, the greater the damage done.
Tania Branigan is foreign leader writer for the Guardian and author of Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution
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