James Fallows makes the case I’ve been anxious to read. He spent lots of time in China and therefore sees this phenomenon very clearly:
This post is about three aspects of China’s modern history that Americans should pay more attention to—for our own good. Two of them are well-known Chinese (and American) success stories that Trump-era policy is ignoring. The third is a self-inflicted disaster in China with all too many similarities to the current MAGA path. All are being discussed non-stop in the China-hand crowd, but they should move more into mainstream attention. (This post is occasioned by Donald Trump’s talk this past week with Xi Jinping, and the increasing insanity of the US approach toward China.)
Donald Trump may not know any Chinese history, or any history at all.1 The people around him may not care. The rest of us can’t afford to ignore it.
Let’s start with the two clear success stories, now being reversed.
I’ll leave it to you to read the success stories that are being reversed. It’s about higher education and industrial policy.
This is the bad news:
In the first week I was at college, in September 1966, I attended a campuswide lecture by the renowned China scholar John King Fairbank. Something big is happening in China, he said. But we’re not sure exactly what it is. The mystery was because China was then so sealed off from the outside world.
That something turned out to be the launch of Mao’s disastrous Cultural Revolution, then just dawning, which unleashed forces of nihilism, victimization, and violence across the country through most of the following decade.
Everyone who’s read about Chinese history knows about the carnage that followed. But not that many Americans are Chinese history buffs. And for people in China, this is one of three awkward moments of 20th century Chinese Communist history being erased from public awareness, through info-control. (The other two are the devastating nationwide famines during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” of the 1950s, and the years of political repression that followed the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989.3)
Despite nonstop reminders that China and the rest of Asia really “matter” to Americans, it’s still a far less accessible-seeming part of US public knowledge than info about most of Europe (or the Americas). It’s too far away, the languages are too different and difficult, fewer people have ongoing ties or familiarity there. An intriguing data point: Only about 1,000 American students are now enrolled in Chinese universities. More than 22,000 now attend schools just in the UK.
One result of this imbalanced familiarity is that when Americans hear or talk about dictatorship, fascism, and oppression, we’re likely to talk or think about Nazis. (Or maybe about Stalin’s gulags, or Putin’s enemies falling out of buildings.) The weakness of these as examples or analogies is that they’re so over the top.
Instead I wish Americans would start reading, thinking, and talking even more about the disaster of China’s Cultural Revolution. Because it is all too easy to imagine that most of what Mao and the Red Guards did to China, Trump and Doge and Miller and Noem and Bondi can be doing to the United States.
Just after Trump took office again, many China hands wrote valuable essays about just this parallel. For instance: Our friend Orville Schell with “Trump’s Cultural Revolution.” Or one in CleanTechnica titled “Science Purge Is Part of United States’ Echoing Of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.” Or this by Geremie Barme likening Trump to Mao during Trump’s first term. There are many more. Recently Michael Bonin, in “Can Today’s American people learn something from the Chinese Cultural Revolution?” laid out a set of unnerving parallels. (These are direct quotes, with parenthetical comments as in the original.)
– First, it is a revolution which mobilizes people about culture…
– This purging is the result of an irrepressible desire for revenge…
– The victims are at the same time intellectuals and officials, although bureaucrats appear as the main target…The destruction of the administration is based on a lawless terror implemented by radicals protected at the highest level (Red Guards in China, members of DOGE in the US), putting into jeopardy entire branches of the administration.
– This “revolution” is quick and bewildering, leaving everyone overwhelmed.
– The great leader is trying to reform the ideology of the entire people by destroying nefarious ideas (“woke”, “LGBT+” in the US, “revisionist”, “counterrevolutionary” in Mao’s China).
– This ideological reform relies on the imposition of a “correct” vocabulary by coercive means (thus the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America as decreed by Trump.)…
– An essential method for controlling the minds of the people is the cult of personality of the great leader…
– Finally, an important similarity is the ideal of a “purified” society that is free of dangerous outsiders.
What the Cultural Revolution boiled down to was a cult-driven assault on knowledge itself. On scholarship, on expertise, on rules, on institutions that might outlast one mood or one set of rulers. It was “feed it into the wood chipper,” before wood chippers were invented. It was “move fast and break things,” in a country too poor to afford much breakage. It was “some men just want to watch the world burn.” It is what China did to itself, and what some Americans are doing to this country now.
Terrifying but all too apt.
We aren’t China. But we could be.