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.

美国努力应对特朗普政府引发的动荡之际，许多中国人发现自己对于美国人的遭遇可以感同身受。

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.

他们说这感觉有点像文化大革命，那个时期被称为“十年动乱”。埃隆·马斯克派去捣毁美国政府的年轻助手让一些中国人想起了毛泽东在文化大革命如火如荼之际发动起来摧毁官僚体制的红卫兵。在听说特朗普总统考虑第三个任期时，他们开玩笑说，中国领导人习近平一定在说，“我知道该怎么做”——他在2022年通过修改宪法获得连任。

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.

美国帮助中国实现现代化并发展经济，希望它变得更像自己——更加民主、更加开放。现在对一些中国人来说，美国倒是看起来越来越像中国了。

“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.”

“我们来自专制集权国家，我们知道独裁不只是体制，本质是对权力的追逐，”记者王剑在一篇批评特朗普的X帖子中写道。“我们还知道文革就是破坏建制来扩大权力。”

For these Chinese, who strive for democratic values but contend with an authoritarian state, their role model is tearing itself down. They are expressing their alarm in interviews, articles and social media comments that range in emotion from disappointment and anger to sardonic.

对于这些追求民主价值观，但在与一个专制国家抗争的中国人来说，他们的榜样正在自我毁灭。他们在采访、文章和社交媒体评论中表达了自己的不安，个中情绪有失望、愤怒，也有冷嘲热讽。

“Beacon of democracy, 1776-2025,” wrote a commenter on a post by the official Weibo social media account of the U.S. Embassy in China.

“民主的灯塔，1776～2025，”美国驻华大使馆官方微博的一篇帖子下有人评论道。

They’re witnessing things they thought could happen only in China: sycophantic official announcements, intimidation of the media and top entrepreneurs vying for favor from the leadership, not to mention a president who calls himself a king.

他们正在目睹他们原本认为只有在中国才会发生的事情：阿谀奉承的官方公告、对媒体的恐吓、顶尖的企业家竞相讨好领导人，更别提一位自称国王的总统了。

“I’m overwhelmed with a sense of familiarity — it feels so much like China,” Zhang Wenmin, an investigative journalist known by her pen name, Jiang Xue, told me. Ms. Zhang was forced to leave China because of her work and moved to the United States in 2023. “I’ve just gotten out of the frying pan and into the fire,” she said.

笔名江雪的调查记者张文敏告诉我，“我有一种似曾相识的感觉——感觉太像中国了。”因为自己的报道工作，张文敏被迫离开中国，并于2023年移居美国。“才出狼窝，又入虎穴。”

Of course, the two countries are fundamentally different.

当然，这两个国家在根本上是不同的。

China is a one-party state lacking in three pillars of the American system: liberty, democracy and the rule of law. 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.

中国是一个一党制国家，缺乏美国体制的三大支柱：自由、民主和法治。数百万中国人死于文化大革命，数千万人受到迫害。美国发生的事情远没有到这样的程度。“并不完全一样，”几十年来一直在报道中国的美国记者张彦(Ian Johnson)告诉我。“但历史的相似之处永远不会完全相同，因为历史并不会真正重演。”他说，美国的制度是在没有外部压力的情况下自我撕裂，这与中共在1966年文化大革命高潮的时候的做法类似。

After the Cultural Revolution, which destroyed nearly all institutions in China, the country tried to build something like those American foundations. Despite official restrictions, lawyers, journalists and entrepreneurs built a budding civil society that tried to hold the government accountable.

文化大革命几乎摧毁了中国所有的制度，之后，中国试图建立与美国的立国基石类似的东西。它提出党政分开，并尝试举行村级选举。尽管受到官方限制，律师、记者和企业家还是建立了一个新兴的公民社会，试图让政府担起责任来。

These are the Chinese who suffered the most when Mr. Xi smothered efforts to make China a more open and democratic society, and they’re also the most disappointed at what’s happening in the United States.

在习近平扼杀了让中国成为一个更开放、更民主社会的种种努力后，他们是最痛苦的一群中国人，对于美国正在发生的事情，他们也最为失望。

They 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.

许多中国人对特朗普总统领导下美国政策的突变感到震惊。最引人注目的是政府机构在社交媒体帖子中使用的语言。人们说，这种语气听起来像中共的宣传。

“Even the CCP’s embassy posts, with all its propaganda, doesn’t spend every single day obsessively praising Xi Jinping,” Deng Haiyan, a former police officer turned critic of the Chinese government, wrote on X.

“说实话，入脑入心入魂的中共驻外大使馆的媒体，也没有天天不务正业吹习近平。”曾在中国当过警察、现在对中国政府持批评态度的邓海燕在社交媒体平台X上写道。

“You’d think People’s Daily had moved into the U.S. Consulate,” he wrote, referring to the official newspaper for the Chinese Communist Party.

“看多了你以为是人民日报搬进了美领馆。”他写道。

The official Weibo account of the U.S. Embassy in China, which has 3.5 million followers, used to be a platform for the U.S. government to spread American values and reliable information. Chinese who share those values would sometimes use the comment sections of the account to vent about their own government.

美国驻华大使馆官方微博账号有350万名粉丝，曾经是美国政府传播美国价值观和可靠信息的平台。认同这种价值观的中国人有时会使用该账户的评论区来发泄对中国政府的不满。

R. Nicholas Burns, who was the U.S. ambassador in China until January, talked about the importance of using social media to interact with the Chinese public. “One of the major preoccupations of our mission,” he said in a speech in 2023, “is to try to tell the truth about American society, American history, U.S.-China relations to the Chinese people.”

在今年1月卸任的美国驻华大使尼古拉斯·伯恩斯曾经谈到利用社交媒体与中国公众互动的重要性。“我们的主要任务之一，”他在2023年的一次演讲中说道，“就是努力向中国人民讲述美国社会、美国历史、美中关系的真相。”

That truth telling, he added, was meant to counter a distorted version of the United States from the Chinese official media. The Weibo account was intended as a Chinese-language bulletin board about American values.

他还说，讲出真相是为了反驳中国官方媒体对美国的歪曲。这个微博账户本来是作为一个传播美国价值观的中文公告板。

在文化大革命期间，毛泽东接见红卫兵，摄于1966年。

In the past month, many of the embassy’s Weibo posts, which overlap with some of the posts on its X account, were flooded with angry comments from Chinese users expressing disappointment.

过去一个月里，大使馆的许多微博帖子（与其X账号上的一些帖子重复）被中国用户表达失望的愤怒评论所淹没。

“Shame on you!” many Weibo users with IP addresses in China commented on posts about the U.S. policies toward Ukraine.

许多IP地址显示国内的微博用户在与美国的乌克兰政策相关的帖子下发表评论道：“你们真可耻！”

On a post about remarks Mr. Trump made about human rights, one user wrote: “And you think you’re worthy of talking about human rights? You betrayed Ukraine!”

在一篇特朗普谈人权的帖子下，一位用户写道：“你觉得你配谈人权？你背叛了乌克兰！”

The changes of both content and style on the Weibo account led one commenter to tease the account’s social media editor: “Blink twice if you’ve been kidnapped.” The embassy press office declined to comment.

这个微博账户的内容和风格都发生了变化，有留言者取笑该账户的社交媒体编辑：“如果你被绑架了，眨两下眼。”大使馆新闻办公室拒绝就本文置评。

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

对许多中国人而言，华盛顿的混乱是由一种熟悉的冲动所驱使的。

“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.”

“瓦解美国‘深层政府’的唯一途径是透过‘文化大革命’，”北京大学法学教授张千帆在一篇广为转发的关于美国民主受到侵蚀的文章中写道。“美国的‘文化大革命’带来的既不是诚实，也不是效率，而只是摧毁了每个人生存所必需的法治。”

The characteristics of authoritarian leaders, such as surrounding themselves with loyalists and trying to control the media, are not unique to China.

威权主义领导人的种种特征——例如身边都是忠于自己的人，并试图控制媒体——并非中国独有。

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao promoted a semiliterate peasant to the office of vice premier and a low-level cadre at a textile mill to be his deputy at the age of 38.

在文化大革命期间，毛泽东提拔了一名半文盲的农民担任副总理，还把一个38岁的纺织厂基层干部提拔为副主席。

For his third term, Mr. Xi has surrounded himself with loyalists, many of whom did not go to elite Chinese universities. Neither do they have lengthy experience working in the central government, unlike members of the previous two Chinese administrations.

在第三个任期中，习近平身边的都是自己人，其中许多人都并非中国的名校毕业。与前两届中国政府的成员不同，他们也没有在中央长期工作的经验。

Last week, when the U.S. Embassy in China posted on its Weibo account that the White House would pick the media outlets allowed to participate in the presidential press pool, a user in the southwestern city Chongqing commented, “Selectively allowing certain media outlets to conduct interviews — such a familiar tactic.”

上周，当美国驻华大使馆在微博账户上发帖称，白宫将负责挑选参加总统记者团的媒体时，重庆的一位用户评论说，“选择性地允许某些媒体进行采访——这是一种熟悉的策略。

For Chinese, one of the most astonishing aspects is how fast Mr. Trump seems to be building a cult of personality.

对中国人而言，最令人惊讶的一点是，特朗普似乎正在快速建立起个人崇拜。

After he showed off hats that said “Trump was right about everything,” a user on X wrote in Chinese: “Mao Zedong of America has been born! Long live the great leader Chairman Trump — long live, long live, long long live!”

在他炫耀了写着“特朗普什么都是对的”的帽子后，X上的一位用户用中文写道：“美国的毛泽东诞生了！伟大的领袖川主席万岁，万岁，万万岁！”

Li Weiao, a Beijing-based journalist, posted a video clip on Weibo that shows Mr. Trump enjoying a standing ovation at his first cabinet meeting in his second term. “I think I truly underestimated the dark side of human nature,” he wrote on Weibo.

北京记者李微敖在微博上发布了一段视频，显示特朗普在第二个任期内的第一次内阁会议上享受与会者起立鼓掌的画面。“我是真低估了‘人类的劣根性’了，”他在微博上写道。

“The rhythm of this applause feels so familiar,” a lawyer commented on Mr. Li’s post. Another commenter wrote: “Just like North Korea and its friend,” referring to China.

“这拍巴巴掌的节奏好熟悉，”一名律师在这篇帖子下评论道。“还有一位评论者写道：“就像朝鲜和它的朋友一样”，后者指的是中国。

In a comment on an episode of my Chinese-language podcast, a YouTube viewer wrote a parody of a White House announcement in the style of Communist Party propaganda.

在我的中文播客的YouTube频道，一位观众在某一期的评论区以共产党的宣传风格写了一段白宫公告。

“The entire Republican Party and all of America must unite even more closely around the White House Central Committee with President Trump at its core, holding high the great banner of American-style capitalism,” the user wrote. “We must fully implement Trump’s New Era American Capitalism Thought, stay united in purpose, uphold tradition while innovating, forge ahead with determination, and fight tirelessly to achieve the great MAGA goal!”

“全共和党全美利坚必须更加紧密地团结在以特朗普总统为核心的白宫中央周围，高举美利坚特色资本主义伟大旗帜，”该用户写道。“全面贯彻特朗普新时代美利坚特色资本主义思想，同心同德、守正创新，锐意进取、顽强拼搏，为实现伟大的MAGA目标而共同奋斗！”