Five Ways Trump is making America Look More Like China

One rationale behind the United States’ decades of a wide range of engagement with China, from trade to technology and from education to culture, was to encourage China in its reforms and liberalization so that one day the socialist one-party Middle Kingdom would become more like America.

In many ways, however, instead of China becoming more like America, America is, increasingly these days, becoming more like China. Here are five ways.

1. Trump leads in everything

In China, the saying is that the Communist Party leads in everything. At the top of the party is Xi Jinping, general secretary of its central committee. However, Xi is part of the seven-member Standing Committee of a 24-member Politburo and works through a consensus in making the country’s most important policy decisions.

In this sense, President Trump has outdone Xi Jinping, especially in his capricious authoritarian style. Trump doesn’t need any committee or anybody to sign hundreds of his executive orders or make any kind of an announcement such as raising tariffs on all America’s trading partners; firing inspectors general or heads of Labor Statistics or the CDC, shutting down Voice of America and USAID, gutting FEMA, dismantling the Department of Education; attacking the Fed; threatening law firms, judges, media organizations, universities, even non-profits with funding cuts and lawsuits; ordering National Guard troops to LA, DC as law enforcement; suggesting that Coca-Cola use cane sugar and that the Washington Commanders change their name back to the “Redskins,” or Cracker Barrel keep its old logo. So, in America, Trump leads in everything.

2. America’s industrial policies and subsidies

Industrial policy has long been a sore spot in U.S. trade relations with China, which is famous for its Five-Year Plans, later renamed Five-Year Guidelines. Made in China 2025’s program, which is aimed at the country’s self-sufficiency in key high-tech sectors, was especially criticized for its massive state-directed investment and subsidies.

That kind of investment and subsidies came to be recognizable in the U.S. with the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 under President Biden. The Act authorized $280 billion in new grants, loans, and tax credits to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors, along with workforce training. That Act was then followed by Biden’s massive Inflation Reduction Act, that was the largest federal legislation (with $783 billion in provisions) to address climate change and clean energy production, including grants, investment tax credits, green banks, and EV purchase tax credits.

One Big Beautiful Bill passed by the Congress under the new Trump administration continued and expanded on CHIPS and Science subsidies for the semiconductor manufacturers from 25% to 35%. The bill also allocated billions of dollars of direct funding for critical minerals, including $7.5 billion received by DOD. It then incentivized the oil and gas industry with a big tax break, exempting them from the corporate alternative minimum tax.

Several years before, the first Trump administration also made direct payments (a total of $28 billion) to American farmers in 2018 and 2019, as a bailout and an aid package, to help domestic farmers from a trade war with China.

3. America’s emerging state capitalism

State capitalism is a spectrum, from an economy controlled by the government as a single huge corporation to a privatized economy subject to government planning and intervention. China went from a near 100% state-owned economy 45 years ago to one dominated by the private sector today. This change was described in four numbers by Edward Cunningham, director of Harvard Kennedy School’s China Programs: 60/70/80/90, meaning that private firms contribute approximately 60% of China’s GDP, 70% of its innovative capacity, 80% of urban employment, and 90% of new jobs. In comparison, the government and private sectors’ contributions to U.S. GDP in 2024 were 17% and 83% respectively, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data.

While China’s economy has become more private over the years, or more like America’s, President Trump is moving the U.S. economy in the other direction. He ordered the creation of a U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund to pursue national endeavors in economic growth; obtained a golden share for the government in U.S. Steel after its acquirement by Nippon Steel; made Nvidia and AMD agree to share 15% of their sales revenue with the government; and bought 10% stake in Intel as part of government grants to the company totaling $8.9 billion.

In the same vein, DOD entered into a ten-year agreement with MP Materials, a rare earth mining and refining operation, with a $150 million loan and a purchase of $400 million of the company’s stock, aiming for U.S. independence of rare earth magnets manufacturing. That was just the beginning, as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested that a monstrous discussion was going on within the administration about defense, such as Lockheed Martin Corp, for more public-private partnerships.

4. Trump’s cultural revolution

China suffered a notorious Cultural Revolution from 1966-1976. It was a much broader revolution than just culture, as the Communist Party struggled over China’s path forward between socialism and capitalism. Mao, however, started it first by singling out art and literature as well as education, attacking bourgeois and counter-revolutionary intellectuals.

Interestingly, Trump shares a similar instinct and aversion towards culture, or “woke” culture. Trump dismissed a bipartisan board at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, made himself the chair, and picked the new honorees and turned down “woke” ones. He withheld or threatened to strip funding from universities, including Columbia, Penn, Harvard, UC Berkeley, accusing of them of supporting antisemitism and transgender rights. He issued an executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which accused a revisionist movement of putting our nation’s history in a negative light, and criticized the Smithsonian Institution being under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.

In this respect as to how America’s history should be displayed, Trump is not unlike Xi Jinping who told China’s government officials, media, educators, writers, artists, and diplomats to “Tell China’s story well.” That meant telling a sanitized story of China, a CCP version story of China, a story of China’s success and glory — including asserting of no famine under the Great Leap Forward, no misery of the Cultural Revolution, and no bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square.

5. Social media scrutiny

China’s censorship of social media is well-known. The powerful machine can snatch anyone anywhere in the world, especially Chinese nationals, inside or outside of China’s borders, for any of their anti-China, anti-CCP, or anti-Xi Jinping utterances.

That fear doubled for Chinese students in the U.S. and Chinese applicants for U.S. visas in May when Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the U.S. would begin “aggressively” revoking visas of Chinese students in “sensitive” fields of study or with CCP ties, and in June when the State Department started vetting all visa applicants of their social media profiles. The expanded screening would look in an applicant’s online presence for “any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles of the United States.”

The result for the Chinese students has been scrambling to scrub their social media messages of any possible offenses. They knew how to watch their speech at home under the Chinese government, now they had to learn to watch their speech in the United States, reputed for its free speech. Some Chinese students considered other options or other countries with clearer rules, less visa ambiguity and angst, as The Atlantic reported. The headline of The Atlantic article said it all: “Chinese Students Feel a Familiar Chill in America.”