Cautioning His Students to Stay Quiet, A Scholar of China Hears Echoes of Its Past in America’s Present
As the MAGA movement attacks members of the Democratic party as “socialists” and “communists” while positioning China as the “greatest threat” to American security, it might seem strange to compare Donald Trump to Mao Zedong, a figure alternately worshipped and reviled for his role in the Chinese revolution. As a scholar of modern Chinese fiction, film, and cultural history, much of what has unfolded throughout the American political arena over the past few months has felt eerily reminiscent of events from the era of high socialism and the reign of Mao Zedong.
The term “political purge” is a commonly used keyword for those of us familiar with this period; purges came in waves, from the Anti-Rightist Movement to the Cultural Revolution. But I don’t think I’d ever heard the term used to describe American politics, at least not until the past few weeks, when recent headlines speak of the seemingly incessant “purges” taking place at the FBI, DOJ, and other federal agencies. When Donald Trump announced he was firing members of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees and installing himself as chairman, I was immediately reminded of Mao’s hands-on approach to curating cultural discourse, from his early “Yan’an Talks on Art and Literature” in 1942 to installing his wife Jiang Qing as the unofficial cultural czar during the Cultural Revolution. The list of comparisons goes on, from the way Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have offered long sycophantic statements about Trump’s brilliant leadership, to the broader cult of personality—with red MAGA hats replacing little red books. Some Trump allies have even begun sporting Trump lapel pins, that recall the coveted Mao badges worn by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. The employment of lofty, categorical speech like “My fellow Americans, get ready for an incredible future, because the golden Age of America has only just begun. It will be like nothing that has ever been seen before” immediately brings to mind a litany of similarly florid praise for Mao: Lin Biao’s famous description of Mao as a “great teacher, great leader, great supreme commander and great helmsman” or the Central Committee’s description of the Cultural Revolution as a “great revolution that will touch the people to their very souls.” And then of course there are each leaders’ disparaging takes on intellectuals and education and penchant for unleashing political chaos. There is also a powerful sense of uncanny irony when a regime that has repeatedly characterized China as “the greatest threat to America,” taken a particularly aggressive stance on China with current tariff policies is simultaneously internalizing so many of China’s worst political practices from the darkest days of its socialist past. Of course, others including Orville Schell and Fareed Zakaria have observed these troubling echoes. But another parallel has me particularly concerned.
For several generations now, the overriding philosophy of life for many Chinese intellectuals and average citizens has been “mingzhe baoshen,” (明哲保身) which dictionaries define as “a wise man looks after his own hide” or “put one’s own safety before matters of principle” but can be also be rendered more colloquially as “keep your head down, mouth shut, and stay out of trouble.” After decades of political movements that have targeted intellectuals and citizens for speaking out, alternately resulting in criticisms, attacks, imprisonment, re-education, and other forms of persecution, most Chinese people have learned that there is no benefit to protesting, or speaking “truth to power.” When an artist, writer, or intellectual does dare to speak out, the government response is often swift and severe. The artist-provocateur Ai Weiwei was detained in 2011 for alleged “economic crimes.” The citizen journalist Zhang Zhan, was imprisoned after covering the Wuhan lockdown. As a result, the vast majority of citizens prefer to embrace mingzhe baoshen as the only reasonable path forward. Over time, this philosophy has been internalized across generations; when it comes to traumatic events like the Cultural Revolution or June 4, parents don’t pass on their experiences to their children and survivors don’t tell their tales.
After more than a quarter century in the classroom teaching students from China, it’s clear that, over time, mingzhe baoshen also manifests as a form of “collective amnesia.” Generations of young people have no knowledge of those traumatic experiences from the past. At least here in the United States, we enjoyed a political system that afforded us the right to remember past traumas, to commemorate the past, to dissent, perform acts of civil disobedience, to speak truth to power—or so I thought.
On March 6, Axios ran a story about a new project launched by Secretary Rubio to conduct AI-assisted reviews of international students’ social media accounts to “Catch and Revoke” the visas of those who allegedly sympathized with Hamas after its October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. On March 8, former Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, a U.S. permanent resident with a green card, was detained by ICE for participating in protests on the Columbia campus. Over the next month, a series of additional arrests, detentions, revocations of student visas, and repatriations would follow, and there seems to be more to come.
While I understand that, as a green card holder, Mahmoud Khalil should enjoy the same rights as U.S. citizens under the law, I am afraid those rights are being violated in the same way those laws are being tossed aside. And as a faculty member from one of the campuses where protests raged, I understand that the vast majority of student protesters are not “pro-Hamas” and “antisemitic”; they are simply fighting for a more just world where innocent people are not arbitrarily slaughtered. For most of them, the killings that took place on October 7 are just as horrific as the killings that have been going on in Gaza.
But I also understand the cold machinations of the political machine currently at work. On March 14, I texted a group of international graduate students I know with a simple message: mingzhe baoshen. It was also a painful message because it is one phrase I never thought I would have to use with my students here in the United States where I once believed we had freedom of _expression_ and a just legal system that would protect the rights of our citizens, permanent residents, and friends from afar who have come here to study, work, and seek a better life. It was also painful because the horrific parallels between Trump and Mao I began with are out there. That is, the things Trump is doing that echo Mao are out of our control—they describe a top-down political shift that, while terrifying, is hard for average citizens to mitigate. However, mingzhe baoshen is about us. It is a response that directly reflects our own behavior. It is how we internalize a culture of repression and terror where students can be rounded up by plainclothes men in hoods and detained for what? Co-writing an op-ed in a student newspaper? Showing up for a campus protest? Liking a post on Facebook? According to Inside Higher Ed, as of April 21, more than 1,500 students from nearly 250 institutions have had their visas revoked, including at least 19 students at my home campus of the University of California Los Angeles. Our international students, who once came here not only to learn from us, but also to experience our democratic values, free speech being central among those, are now being targeted and criminalized for internalizing those core values. But as they are now vulnerable and easy targets for the current regime, perhaps, for the time being, they do need to keep their heads low, their mouths shut, and stay out of trouble. Of all the eerie echoes of Chinese political history that seem to be reverberating through contemporary America, none speaks more loudly than the dark cloud of silence setting in—mingzhe baoshen. But for those of us with citizenship, a platform, and a voice, and, hopefully, the right to free _expression_, now more than ever, we need to take a note from Trump’s own playbook and, to quote the man himself, “fight like hell.”