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Fascist Superpowers: China Today, America Tomorrow?

-- By YuruiWu - 20 Feb 2025

Sometime in the earlier stages of the first Trump presidency, I would often say to my friends that Donald Trump would love to be president in China. The statement was mostly a bad attempt at humoring myself and my audience in an increasingly depressing world – a world that we have created, or at the very least, let it happen.

But as ludicrous as the statement was in some way, I believed there was some truth to it. Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, had amended the Constitution to allow himself an unprecedented third five-year term, effectively making himself an emperor for life. Overseas commentators noted that he has amassed more power in China than any previous leaders since the time of Mao by purging adversaries in government and locking up critics in civil society. The front pages of newspapers and websites sang his praises every day, even though it seemed like he did nothing of consequence most days of the year. Trump must be so jealous of the endless power and praises Xi bathes in. If he were running China, he would never have to deal with critical media or an independent judiciary, let alone the celebration his racist and misogynist rhetoric would have received among the Chinese public. But here in the U.S., he could be stopped – or so I thought.

Anti-Fascist Institutions

Trump was first elected a year after I came to the U.S. for school from Beijing. I would tell my host family how depressing it is for me that just as I managed to escape from one authoritarian regime for nine months each year, another authoritarian leader was taking over the U.S., my new adopted home.

Xi’s power grab in China and Trump’s rise in America coincided with my political awakening, so I was not capable of describing what I was feeling. Today, the more accurate word to describe the leaders of the two largest hegemonies would be “fascist”. In his New Yorker article, Timothy Snyder identified a characteristic of fascism in Stalinist Russia and America under Trump as the disassociation between language and its meaning. The more I learned about what was happening in Chinese society, the more I realized that words and popular slogans in official media were devoid of meaning.

Truth in language is also at the core of two critical pillars of society that set America apart from China. When injustice happens in America, journalists use straightforward language to uncover and explain the truth. When elected officials spread falsehood, reporters fact-check them and attempt to hold them accountable. After Trump was first elected, it appeared that liberal Americans believed in this power as they gave support to newspapers by subscribing and tuning into the evening news. The increasing demand for journalism was an endorsement of truth and passive resistance to fascism.

While journalism is responsible for upholding the truth in public discourse, lawyers fought back in the courtroom by employing the meaning behind the words in the Constitution. Of course, a brand of lawyers and judges have long sought to alter the meaning of those very words, but protecting the rights of the vulnerable in the courts has mostly worked. In Trump’s first term, judicial review successfully stopped him from harming many.

In China, to the limited extent that language had meaning in journalism and the courts before, Xi has managed to turn those institutions away from the truth. The courts are an extension of his power. The media is part of the propaganda machine.

Trump would love to be Xi. It should be no surprise that in his second term, he has increased his attacks on journalism and the courts, the two institutions that could still uphold the meaning behind language.

Amnesia nation?

Last semester, when Professor Benjamin Liebman discussed his decades-long experience observing the Chinese legal system and its further descent into authoritarianism under Xi at a lunch talk, I asked him if there was a way out of the downward spiral. He said he hopes that Xi will eventually die and maybe the next generation of leaders will be more liberal. I responded that I think that is too hopeful. Snyder’s observation on fascism gave me a reason to articulate this pessimism. What Xi, and his predecessors to an extent, have managed to do is to disassociate words with their true meanings. When one generation after another is raised in an environment where language bears no relation to truth, that is all they will ever know. Thanks to modern censorship technology, the Chinese government is more than capable of keeping society that way. Even countless deaths and mass starvation in its most populous and international city during a pandemic were not enough to alter that. There was collective rage and a brief moment of hope, but when language has no meaning, the public loses the collective tool to remember, and they soon forget. If more and more people become comfortable living in a fascist society, why justify the hope the next leaders will be better?

I am more hopeful that my adopted home will not turn into my birth country under Trump. It was further away from fascism than China ever was, and thus Trump would need to break more norms, and we would have more opportunities to resist. His electoral defeat in 2020 and the brief moment when some Republicans began condemning him demonstrates that.

But Trump’s comeback and Xi’s popularity show the resilience of fascist leaders and their appeal to many. I am unsure if the Chinese society still has an opportunity to say no to fascism. It has been in amnesia for so long that it would take a miracle. The depressing reality in China shows that a fascist movement must be stopped before it silently destroys the remaining guardrails of truth in language and takes over the entire society. Trump and his followers would love to turn the United States into China. This is not the time to go under amnesia.

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