Can Today’s American people learn something from the Chinese Cultural Revolution?
By Michel Bonnin | 11 March 2025
Just a few days after Trump reentered the Oval Office, analysts of American politics were already feeling that what was brutally happening under the world’s eyes was a “regime change” and more precisely an autogolpe: a coup attempted by an already installed leader, intent on changing the system in order to get total control of the country, possibly for life.
But, for people knowledgeable about Chinese contemporary history, Trump’s coup against the American institutions was more like Mao’s Cultural Revolution (CR) than any other historical episode. After the creation of The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an agency led by Elon Musk to cut federal spending and purge the administration on a large scale, political scientist Minxin Pei published an article entitled “Hey, Elon. You Know Who Else Was a Disruptor? Mao”.
It might seem surprising to make a parallel between two historical events happening in so different times and settings. Historian Quinn Slobodian has convincingly presented the ideological sources of the present American far-right revolution. He invokes Grand Guignol and cosplay, when describing what happened at the Capitol in January 2021 and what happens now. The Cultural Revolution was indeed a form of Grand Guignol, at the same time “serious and ridiculous,” although the scales cannot be compared.
The similarities are partly the result of a basic proximity in Mao’s and Trump’s personalities, already described by China scholar Geremie Barmé at the beginning of Trump’s first presidency. But things are now more interesting, because at the beginning of the second presidency, we can observe a purer Trump exactly as the CR revealed a purer Mao, both having decided to get rid of the officials who used to restrain them. We have the charismatic personality in full bloom, revealing its many common features.
I shall try and make a list of the most obvious similarities:
– First, it is a revolution which mobilizes people about culture (For Mao, revisionist and capitalist, for Trump, woke and pro-LGBT+) but maybe more deeply an attempt at changing the political system and purging political enemies.
– This purging is the result of an irrepressible desire for revenge (For Trump, against the Democrats and those who questioned his attempted coup or his links with Russia. For Mao, against state president Liu Shaoqi and the bureaucracy who opposed the catastrophic Great Leap Forward policy).
– The victims are at the same time intellectuals and officials, although bureaucrats appear as the main target (“persons in charge following the capitalist line” in China, “members of the Deep State” in the US). 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.) This is particularly reminiscent of the changing of street and personal names in the Cultural Revolution.
– Many highly educated people are suspected by Trump of being leftist and woke, as they were suspected by Mao of being rightist and counterrevolutionary. People with less education are appreciated because they “believe” more easily in the alternative reality promoted by the Great Helmsman.
– An essential method for controlling the minds of the people is the cult of personality of the great leader. Mao created his own cult and reached God-like status during the Cultural Revolution. Trump has still some way to go, but he also succeeded in presenting himself as an envoy from God to save America. When government meetings begin with a collective prayer thanking God for giving Trump to the Americans, one is reminded of meetings in the Cultural Revolution which began with the entire leadership standing up, reading from the Little Red Book and ending with shouts of “Long Live Chairman Mao!”
– Interestingly, both charismatic leaders relied on another personality to be the great priest of their religion. The “Number Twos” became as important as potential successors and also cultivated a personal cult of personality. Military leader Lin Biao received for some time a mention in the quasi-religious praise addressed to Mao that every Chinese had to utter in public, whereas Elon Musk’s cult is also advancing, as shown by the huge statue erected of his likeness near the Tesla factory in Texas.
– Finally, an important similarity is the ideal of a “purified” society that is free of dangerous outsiders. Trump is famous for his determination to expel millions of illegal immigrants (presented as bad people) and to block others from entering. During the Cultural Revolution, there was a similar expulsion of people of “bad origin” en masse to their home villages.
Given those similarities between the two revolutions, could today’s Americans draw lessons from the Chinese experience? I can think of three of them:
1) Mao, during the Cultural Revolution, was very successful at destroying the Chinese culture and ethics, as well as law and normal administration (although he was forced to restore bureaucracy after a few years.) The violence permanently scarred society and individuals and he was unable to create anything to replace what he had destroyed. Do not forget that it is easier to destroy than to rebuild.
2) How long will the Trump-Musk honeymoon last? The relationship between Mao and Marshall Lin Biao, who was once “Chairman Mao’s closest comrade-in-arms,” became a paranoid one on both sides. Lin attempted to flee to the USSR in 1971, and his plane crashed in Mongolia in an accident still unexplained. Let’s see if our American comrades-in-arms succeed in escaping the curse. Older dictators do not like to cede power even to someone they have chosen.
3) At the end of the Cultural Revolution, which followed Mao’s death, the only political figure revered by the people was the state’s premier Zhou Enlai, who represented the bureaucracy. People had understood that, despite its faults and arrogance, a functioning State apparatus was a necessary protection for them. The new leaders (leaders who had survived the movement) were not only happy to restore the bureaucracy but they initiated reforms at odds with Mao’s ideas. And after too much violence and suffering, even the youth who had been at the vanguard of Mao’s autogolpe came to appreciate the values of democracy and the rule of law, and these became the mottos of the Democracy Wall Movement that they launched in 1978-79.
Thus, Mao ultimately lost everything superficially achieved during the Cultural Revolution. History will tell if, in the American case, a “counterrevolutionary” force will be able to take shape and to get the support of a disillusioned people, as happened in China at the end of the 1970s.
Michel Bonnin is Professor Emeritus at EHESS-Paris and Adjunct Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, specialising in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Former founding director of China Perspectives, author of The Lost Generation: The Rustication of China’s Educated Youth (1968-1980), CUHK Press, 2013.
https://blogs.soas.ac.uk/china-i ... ultural-revolution/
|
|
