Orville Schell is a grand old man of American sinology, the study of China, as well as a long serving dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
He sees some resemblances between the dispositions of two highly disruptive despots.
When US President Donald Trump’s factotum, 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 America’s confounding new approach to foreign policy. Chinese President Xi Jinping, for his part, has been relatively silent since Trump’s return to the White House – but that doesn’t mean he is any less vexed by what it portends. Nor could he have been reassured by Trump’s brazen response to a question last October about what he would do if Xi blockaded Taiwan: “Xi knows I’m fucking crazy!”
... there is a precedent for Trump’s political blitzkrieg: Mao Zedong. 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 task master” and a “hot-tempered man” who beat his son so brutally, he often ran away from home. But 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. ... his 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” (大字报), calling on China’s youth to rise up and “bombard the headquarters” (炮打司令部) of the very party he had helped found. ...
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 newspaper 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!” (天下大乱形势大好). This impulse to disrupt or “overturn” (翻身) 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.”
... Given that Xi came of age during Mao’s Cultural Revolution and was himself shipped off to the countryside to “eat bitterness” (吃苦) for seven years as a youth, he undoubtedly learned a thing or two about coping with such chaos. Still, Xi may 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 America than in China” (美国的月亮比中国的月亮圆) – has now produced its own grand progenitor of top-down turmoil.
Trump may 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 America, must be looking down from his Marxist-Leninist heaven with a smile, as the East wind may finally be prevailing over the West wind – a dream for which he had long hoped.
I don't actually think dwelling on what's wrong in the psyches of these monsters is very important at present. Mao's dead and largely dishonored. What matters is how to stop our madman and his henchmen from inflicting the kind of death and destruction that Mao inflicted on China.
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