When US President Donald Trump’s factotum, US Vice President J.D. Vance, held forth on Europe’s “threat from within” at the recent Munich Security Conference, his audience was left struggling to make sense of the US’ confounding new approach to foreign policy. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), for his part, has been relatively silent since Trump’s return to the White House — but that does not mean he is any less vexed by what it portends. Nor could he have been reassured by Trump’s brazen response to a question in October last year about what he would do if Xi blockaded Taiwan: “Xi knows I’m fucking crazy!”
US Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso put it more decorously: “President Trump clearly ran for office to be a disrupter, and he’s going to continue to do that.” He is not wrong. In the first 10 days of his second administration, Trump signed more than 50 executive orders; offered all federal workers a buyout; attempted to freeze funding that had already been allocated by the US Congress; threatened tariffs against numerous countries; and rattled allies with endless other insulting diktats.
However, there is a precedent for Trump’s political blitzkrieg: Mao Zedong (毛澤東). While Mao, who launched China’s violent Cultural Revolution, and Trump share little in the way of geography, ideology or hairstyle, they can both be described as agents of insurrection.
Mao’s penchant for disorder was deeply rooted in his troubled relationship with his father, whom he described to writer Edgar Snow as “a severe taskmaster” and a “hot-tempered man” who beat his son so brutally, that he often ran away from home. However, Mao learned from this “war” how to stand up for himself: “When I defended my rights by open rebellion my father relented, but when I remained meek and submissive he only cursed and beat me more.”
This formative childhood experience shaped Mao as a person and drew him to the oppositional politics that helped catalyze the chaos and disorder that engulfed China for decades. As the American academic and diplomat Richard Solomon wrote at the time of the Cultural Revolution, “Thus, one unique individual’s efforts to break the bonds of personal subordination found larger meaning in a nation’s struggle to overcome political subordination.” Here, it is worth noting that during his formative years, Trump, too, had a bullying father who repeatedly told his sons that they would succeed in being “kings” only by being “killers.”
MONKEY KING
During his youth, Mao became a great admirer of the Monkey King, Sun Wukong (孫悟空), from the classic Chinese novel Journey to The West (西遊記). Mao was so enamored of the rebellious and magically endowed Monkey King, whose mantra was “Create great disorder under heaven” (大鬧天宮), that he ended one of his poems with, “We hail Sun Wukong, the wonder-worker!”
The peasant insurrection that Mao launched against Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government in the 1920s was just the beginning of his so-called “permanent revolution” (不斷革命), and many ruinous political campaigns and power struggles followed his founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In 1957, the Anti-Rightist Campaign persecuted hundreds of thousands of intellectuals, while from 1958 to 1962, the “Great Leap Forward” (大躍進) to collectivize agriculture resulted in more than 30 million deaths from starvation and famine-related illnesses.
However, Mao’s most epic political upheaval was the 1966 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, launched in response to what he saw as his fellow leaders’ bureaucratic resistance to his absolutism. He wrote the first “big-character poster” (大字報), calling on China’s young people to rise up and “bombard the headquarters” (炮打司令部) of the very party he had helped found. In the violence and chaos that followed, many leaders, such as former Chinese president Liu Shaoqi (劉少奇) and former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), were purged, while others — including Xi’s own father, former Chinese vice premier Xi Zhongxun (習仲勛) — were thrown into endless “struggle sessions,” sent off to May Seventh Cadre Schools (五七幹校) for “rectification and thought reform” (思想改造), imprisoned, or even killed.
Certain of the righteousness of his crusade against what Trump supporters would call the “deep state,” Mao published a column in the People’s Daily counseling that there is “no need to be afraid of tidal waves. Human society has been evolved out of tidal waves.”
Mao’s abiding belief in the power of resistance led him to celebrate conflict. “Without destruction, there can be no construction” (不破不立), he proclaimed.
Another vaunted slogan of the time declared: “World in great disorder: excellent situation!” (天下大亂情勢大好). This impulse to disrupt or “overturn” China’s class structure proved massively destructive, but Mao justified the resulting violence and upheaval as essential elements of “making revolution” (搞革命) and building a “New China.”
The Trump administration has an equally voracious appetite for disruption and chaos. Palantir Technologies Inc chief executive officer Alex Karp, whose co-founder Peter Thiel is also a Trump acolyte, recently described the new president’s overhaul of the US government as a “revolution” in which “some people will get their heads cut off,” and this revolution’s executioner-in-chief would appear to be the world’s richest person, Elon Musk.
ELON MUSK
Despite obvious differences, Musk is more than a little reminiscent of Kuai Dafu (蒯大富), who was deputized by Mao himself to lead Tsinghua University’s Red Guard movement. Kuai not only brought chaos to his campus, but led 5,000 fellow Red Guards into Tiananmen Square shouting slogans against Liu and Deng, before attempting to lay siege to the nearby leadership compound, Zhongnanhai — much as Trump’s own version of the Red Guards did at the US Capitol in 2021.
Given that Xi came of age during Mao’s Cultural Revolution and was himself shipped off to the countryside to “eat bitterness” for seven years in his youth, he undoubtedly learned a thing or two about coping with such chaos. Still, Xi might have a hard time fully comprehending that the US — a country many Chinese have long admired, even using the expression “the moon is rounder in the US than in China” (美國的月亮比中國的月亮圓) — has now produced its own grand progenitor of top-down turmoil.
Trump might lack Mao’s skills as a writer and theorist, but he possesses the same animal instinct to confound opponents and maintain authority by being unpredictable to the point of madness. Mao, who would have welcomed the catastrophe now unfolding in the US, must be looking down from his Marxist-Leninist heaven with a smile, as the East wind might finally be prevailing over the West wind — a dream for which he had long hoped.
Orville Schell, director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society, is a co-editor (with Larry Diamond) of Chinese Influence and American Interests: Promoting Constructive Engagement.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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