In early March, I asked a lawyer, a naturalized citizen living in Texas, whether he shared the unease among Chinese immigrants that American politics under President Trump was beginning to echo the China we left behind: fawning officials, intimidation of the press and business leaders currying favor with leadership.
He shrugged. As long as late-night talk show hosts can still make fun of the president, he said, American democracy is safe.
For those of us who grew up under strict censorship, late-night comedy always felt like an emblem of American freedom. The idea that millions of Americans could go to bed each night having watched their presidents mocked felt almost magical, something unimaginable where we came from.
That’s why ABC’s suspension of the Jimmy Kimmel show after pressure from the Trump administration, amid the president’s public threats toward critical journalists, felt so jarring. To many Chinese who have endured the relentless erosion of speech by the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, it felt ominous. Free speech rarely vanishes in a single blow. It erodes until silence feels normal.
“Coming from a dictatorship, people like me are sharply attuned to these things,” said Zhang Wenmin, a former investigative journalist in China better known for her pen name Jiang Xue. “We can sense how freedoms are chipped away little by little.”
Ms. Zhang was repeatedly harassed and threatened for what state security agents called her “negative reporting” on China. She now lives in the United States.
The United States is not China. Constitutional protections, an independent judiciary and a robust civil society still provide guardrails. Yet the Trump administration’s menacing comments and actions show how those guardrails can be weakened.
The path China has traveled can offer lessons for Americans about how freedom is lost and the resulting cost.
China has not always been as tightly controlled as it has become under Mr. Xi. In the 1990s and 2000s, censorship could be harsh and people went to jail for their political views. But there was still space for free expression.
Investigative journalists like Ms. Zhang helped expose corrupt officials. The internet and social media then also allowed public debate, and people were able to pressure the government to respond to their concerns.
That started to change, step by step, after Mr. Xi took power in late 2012. He muzzled a newspaper’s editorial, elevated the role of a government official to control the internet and declared that all media must “love, protect and serve the Communist Party.” There was resistance: strikes by journalists, protests by members of the public, and displays of solidarity from entertainers, intellectuals and entrepreneurs. The government responded with arrests, penalties and prohibitions.
Within a few years, it became impossible to do critical journalism in China. Investigative reporters became “extinct.” The social media site Weibo, once a cacophony of debate, became an amplifier for state media. Websites were censored, and forced to self censor, to survive.
The cost of stifling speech had consequences. When an unknown pneumonia surfaced in Wuhan near the end of 2019, Dr. Li Wenliang tried to warn colleagues and friends. He was reprimanded for “spreading rumors.” Warnings were delayed; the window for a public-health response narrowed. After Dr. Li’s death, his message — “a healthy society should not have only one voice” — circulated as both a plea and an indictment.
As the coronavirus spread worldwide, Mr. Xi jailed and silenced more of his critics and mobilized the public to attack a novelist who kept an online diary of her experiences in Wuhan.
The chilling effect took hold. The Chinese internet devolved into a platform for nationalists to praise the government and Mr. Xi. Dissent or criticism is not tolerated. Online grievances are attacked, called ammunition for hostile foreign media. Even public grief and videos about poverty are censored.
The control hasn’t stopped at news media and social media. Films were edited to erase same-sex relationships. Hip-hop artists were ordered to radiate “positive energy.” Economists were told not to speak negatively about China.
Any criticism or mocking of Mr. Xi was forbidden. In 2017, the government censored images and mentions of Winnie-the-Pooh because some saw a resemblance to Mr. Xi.
Ren Zhiqiang, a retired real estate developer, is serving an 18-year sentence for calling Mr. Xi “a power-hungry clown.” Cai Xia, a retired professor at the Communist Party Central School, lost her party membership and pension for calling Mr. Xi a “mafia ringleader.”
Under Mr. Xi, China made it a crime to criticize martyrs and heroes, prosecuting even perceived slander of Communist Party figures.
The Chinese government fined a comedy studio about $2 million in 2023 for a joke comparing China’s military to stray dogs, saying the comedian “severely insulted” the People’s Liberation Army.
Mr. Xi’s effectively canceled voices that are not aligned with his vision for China.
This is why the silencing of Mr. Kimmel and the subsequent remarks by Mr. Trump and his allies ring an alarm for those who have watched freedoms in China erode.
Mr. Kimmel’s show was suspended after he made a remark speculating about the political beliefs of the man who is accused of assassinating the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Think of China’s criminal code for slandering martyrs.
Mr. Trump said last Friday that news reporters who cover his administration negatively were breaking the law. “They’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad,” he said. “See, I think that’s really illegal.” Think of Mr. Xi’s instruction that news reporting should steadfastly focus on positive coverage.
On the Chinese internet, many people sensed something familiar in Mr. Kimmel’s suspension. “Has Trump been trained in China?” asked a Weibo commenter. “The U.S. starts to feel more and more like a dictatorship,” said a comment under a WeChat video posted by the official Xinhua News Agency.
Chinese government censors usually leave more room for the public to express their opinions on unflattering news posts about the United States. Their aim is to help promote the narrative that China is ascendant and the United States is declining.
The United States is far from a one-party state. But China’s example shows how total control can be achieved step by step, through top-down pressure and the self censorship that follows.
Michael Berry, a professor of Chinese literature and cinema at the University of California, Los Angeles, likens the process to how an electric fence holds sheep back: They need to be shocked only once or twice before they never approach the boundary again. That’s how self-censorship works in China, he said, and “now it seems like that’s what’s happening here.”
Mr. Berry said he was worried that the survival strategy of many Chinese intellectuals — to stop speaking out to stay out of trouble — will take root in the United States as people realize they must be cautious to avoid repercussions.
Ms. Zhang, the former journalist, said she had been unsettled to see American institution like ABC and its parent company, Disney, yield to political pressure. She said she and her Chinese friends used to blame themselves for not resisting Beijing more boldly. “I never imagined Americans would be so meek,” she said. “By comparison, we were actually pretty brave.”
Li Yuan writes The New New World column, which focuses on China’s growing influence on the world by examining its businesses, politics and society.
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