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Many Chinese see a Cultural Revolution in America
People in China find echoes of Maoist upheavals in the authoritarian turn that the United States is taking under Donald Trump.
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Red Guards, high school and university students, waving copies of Chairman Mao Zedong's Little Red Book, parading in Beijing's streets in June 1966.
PHOTO: AFP
Li Yuan
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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 billionaire Elon Musk has sent to dismantle the US 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 Donald 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.
