The Real American Maoists

Look who's acting like it's the Great Leap Forward AND the Cultural Revolution!

Photo by Camillo Corsetti Antonini on Unsplash

Over the past five years or so an awful lot of conservative commentators, professional contrarians, and Republican politicians have asserted that 21st century progressivism is akin to Maoism, claiming that “a new totalitarianism is being born” with “inquisitions, its auto-da-fes, its purges and cultural revolutions, reeducation and self-criticism sessions, and above all the ostracization and ultimate erasure of dissidents.” Entire outlets have been born and dedicated to the proposition that cancel culture, wokeism, DEI, and critical race theory have empowered ideological zealots to castigate any heterodox thinkers.

Xi Van Fleet, a survivor of that horrific era in Chinese history, went so far as to write a book making the Maoist analogy explicit, telling one interviewer: “In 2020 when I saw BLM, Antifa, and radical progressives burning and terrorizing our cities in the name of social and racial justice, memories of the chaos of the Chinese Cultural Revolution came back to me.” Van Fleet described the Cultural Revolution as a moment when, “things we had taken for granted were condemned as bourgeois and counter-revolutionary and needed to be canceled or destroyed.”

Van Fleet’s analogy qualifies as over-the-top but effective hyperbole.¹ No political movement should ever want to be compared to Maoism. Mao is responsible for two of the most horrific moments in Chinese history. First, he authored the Great Leap Forward, a catastrophic attempt at rural industrialization that instead resulted in mass famine and the deaths of tens of millions. A few years later Mao followed that up with the Cultural Revolution, a catastrophic attempt to maintain revolutionary fever within the Chinese Communist Party that started with Party functionaries accusing their bosses of elitism and resulted in mass violence and the deaths of millions.

Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump’s America, comparing his administration to Maoist China and MAGA to Maoism seems like a stretch. And yet it is interesting to read the New York Times’ Li Yuan reporting that, hey, Chinese citizens are doing that very thing when looking at America under Trump 2.0:

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….

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. “It’s not exactly parallel,” Ian Johnson, an American journalist who has been writing about China for decades, told me. “But historical parallels are never exact because history doesn’t really repeat itself.” The American system is tearing itself apart with no outside pressure, he said, and this is similar to what the Communist Party did at the peak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966….

[Chinese] have been shocked by the abrupt changes in U.S. policy under President Trump. Most striking is the language government agencies have used in social media postings. The tone, people say, sounds like Chinese Communist Party propaganda….

For many Chinese, the chaos in Washington is driven by a familiar impulse.

“The only way to dismantle America’s ‘deep state’ is through a ‘Cultural Revolution,’” Zhang Qianfan, a professor of law at Peking University, wrote in a widely circulated article about the erosion of American democracy. “The Cultural Revolution brings neither honesty nor efficiency — only the demolition of the rule of law essential to everyone’s survival.”

But surely this is hyperbole, yes? The Trump administration’s chaos, upheaval, cult of personality, and propaganda might be bad but not so bad that older Chinese citizens should experience Maoist déjà vu, right?

Right… except maybe also wrong? On the one hand, the United States under Trump 2.0 is obviously not as totalitarian as Maoist China. On the other hand, the parallels between the second Trump administration and Mao’s rule over China are stronger than the contrarians who loved loved LOVED to analogize wokeism to Maoism dispassionate observers would care to admit.