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American political scientists and historians who study China say they see more parallels today between their area of study, Chinese politics, and their own country, the United States, than ever before. NPR's Emily Feng spent the last decade covering China and has this story.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: David Lampton is a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University on the Washington, D.C., campus.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SAILING THE SEAS (CHINESE CULTURAL REVOLUTION)")
MAOISM SOLDIERS: (Singing in non-English language).
FENG: Lampton also lived in China during what was called the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long mass movement ending in the 1970s to purge what the then-Chairman, Mao Zedong, believed were deep-state elements conspiring against the Communist cause and his hold on power.
DAVID LAMPTON: There are echoes of kind of Cultural Revolution politics in American politics today.
FENG: Specifically...
LAMPTON: The attempt to control media to build a cult of personality all has differences between now here in the U.S. and there, but there are also some, let's say, eerie echoes.
FENG: Echoes, like how the Trump administration has banned the AP's access to certain media events in the Oval Office or onboard Air Force One. Here's Trump.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Now, the Associated Press, as you know, has been very, very wrong on the election, on Trump and the treatment of Trump.
FENG: Lampton is among the China-watchers who have spent most of their adult lives studying China and who now find themselves using their expertise to understand American politics. They stress the U.S. is a democracy with functioning courts to balance the executive branch, and China is a one-party system, so they are not identical. But these China-watchers do feel uneasy at the parallels they are seeing. Orville Schell is director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, and he also sees similarities between Trump and his downsizing of the federal government and Mao Zedong.
ORVILLE SCHELL: Both of these men are deeply in love with the idea that you can't be creative unless you first destroy.
FENG: Mao purged bureaucrats, citing disloyalty and alleged dissent. President Trump has vowed the same.
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TRUMP: Because we are draining the swamp. It's very simple, and the days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over.
FENG: Schell says Mao was constantly suspicious of other party officials - hence, multiple purges.
SCHELL: Here, both men, I think, shared a kind of common sense of paranoia that the existing order is fundamentally hostile to him and needs to be overturned.
FENG: Other China experts, like Yukon Huang at the Washington think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, compare Trump's global outlook to another Chinese leader - the current one, Xi Jinping.
YUKON HUANG: When you talk about make America great again, this is very similar to the view of Xi, who sees a much more expansionary, important role for China and Asia.
FENG: As in, China's aggressive ramp-up of its military and economic influence in the Asia-Pacific and Africa is comparable to Trump's more muscular foreign policy, threatening to take the Panama Canal and expressing desire to control Greenland and Canada, all the while stressing American interests first.
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PRESIDENT XI JINPING: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: One of Xi Jinping's key slogans is this - the China dream - for what he calls here, on the Chinese Communist paper the People's Daily, the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
WU GUOGUANG: Things like MAGA, just like, you know, a China dream.
FENG: This is Wu Guoguang, a former adviser to a reformist Chinese leader. Wu moved to the U.S. in the 1990s and is now a political science researcher at Stanford University, studying how leaders, like China's Xi Jinping, use policy to concentrate power. He says American democracy does have ways to stop this kind of concentration.
WU: Checks and balances and public opinion - OK - civil society.
FENG: But absent mass demonstrations, Wu says he's increasingly pessimistic those checks and balances are working well enough. NPR reached out to two China experts who worked for the Trump administration during the first term. They declined to be interviewed. And Wu is not alone. Last month, more than 1,200 American political scientists signed a letter protesting what they see as the undermining of checks and balances in the U.S. system by the Trump administration.
Emily Feng, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF FRANK OCEAN SONG, "NIKES") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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