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OpinionWorld Opinion
Daniel Wagner
Daniel Wagner

Opinion | Maga and the alarming parallels with China’s Cultural Revolution

Trump is purging officials, persecuting intellectuals and burnishing his cult of personality. If reason prevails, Americans will reject this

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Demonstrators dressed as handmaidens from ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ take part in a ‘Hands Off!’ protest against US President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk at the Washington Monument on April 5. Photo: Reuters
Daniel Wagner

The Cultural Revolution was one of the most turbulent and radical periods in modern Chinese history. Its goal was to reassert Mao Zedong’s control and preserve communist ideology by purging “capitalist” and “traditional” elements from Chinese society. US President Donald Trump is in the early stages of unleashing his own cultural revolution in his attempt to “Make America Great Again”.

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Mao targeted those he saw as counter-revolutionaries, including party officials, intellectuals and capitalist sympathisers. High-ranking leaders were removed and persecuted as Mao consolidated his power after the failure of the Great Leap Forward. Trump is targeting anyone opposed to the Maga movement, consolidating his power by purging officials and persecuting those linked to the Democrats, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and the ancien regime.

In China, academics, teachers, scientists and artists were publicly humiliated, imprisoned, tortured or killed. The more you knew, the more reactionary you were – that summed up the anti-intellectual fervour of the time. In the United States, Trump is publicly humiliating these groups. He has not (yet) gone to the extreme of imprisoning, torturing or killing them – laws exist that prevent extreme persecution in the US. But then the rule of law does not mean much to him. If he could, many Americans believe, he would.

Mao’s Red Guards attacked the enemies of the revolution. They destroyed cultural relics, temples and art, burned books and attacked teachers and their own families. Mao also sought to destroy the Four Olds: old customs, culture, habits and ideas. This resulted in massive cultural and historical destruction.
The Maga movement and its Republican legislators are America’s answer to the Red Guards. They are in the process of banning books, dismantling some of the US’ finest cultural and historical traditions, and returning the country to the days of McCarthyism.

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Why are more Chinese scientists leaving the US to return to China?

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Mao’s image was omnipresent on posters, badges and in the “little red book”. Art, literature and media were tightly controlled and glorified Mao’s ideology.
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