What Is the Purpose of ‘China-Watching’ in the United States Today?

The executive ignored widespread dissent to force through an illiberal agenda. Violent confrontations between protesters and police brought forth increased repression. In less than a year, new policies all but outlawed any form of substantive criticism of the government. On the surface, life appears normal, as journalists, academics, researchers, and others continue to show up to their jobs and churn out their work. But it is only in private whispers that they can safely utter the truth of their new reality: there are now almost as few freedoms here as there are in mainland China.

This is Hong Kong. The story of its recent political transformation following the implementation of the National Security Law in 2020 is deeply familiar to those of us in the American China Studies community. Yet, it seems that we have not learned and applied the lessons of Hong Kong with the urgency befitting our current political transformation here in the United States, which, while of course not identical, is resulting in a similarly rapid erosion of civil liberties. Given the current trajectory, it is past time to seriously consider what our own professional lives will look like over the next few years.

I am still figuring out my own. This autumn, I was laid off from China Digital Times (on amicable terms), due to funding issues caused by downstream effects of the Trump administration’s policies (Pierson and Wang 2025). Frustrated with the lack of urgency and action on the part of the China Studies community, I feel compelled as a peripheral member of it to write about how others might be similarly affected by this increasingly inhospitable atmosphere in the United States. My hope is to spur a public conversation about this issue and offer a potential way forward.

The authoritarian evolution of the United States under the Trump administration is becoming an existential threat to any reporting, analysis, and teaching that is independent, fact-based, and critical. The China Studies field is not immune to this threat. At this rate, our knowledge production and, by extension, the public’s collective understanding of China will ultimately be controlled by those who align with the government’s ideological priorities. If we are to have any agency in the matter, preventing this future will require us to reconfigure our work by acknowledging it as not only a site of contestation but also a tool of resistance that we should utilise fully and unapologetically. By leveraging our China expertise—using intersectional, comparative, and critical lenses—we can analyse and critique the structures of authoritarianism unfolding in both China and the United States, and thereby encourage others to push back.

Collateral Damage

Granted, the China Studies field is not a central target of Trump’s agenda, which has instead been waged across a variety of political terrains in pursuit of broader goals such as centralising power, persecuting real and manufactured enemies, and enriching friends. Under this administration—driven primarily by patriarchal, ethno-nationalist grievance and initially led by a DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) sledgehammer—the damage to the China Studies field appears collateral rather than surgical. And, while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has sought to muzzle many actors in the American China Studies field, along with others within China, Trump’s ideological approach to this suppression in the United States is not identical to that of the CCP nor coordinated with it.

Actors in every domain of the American China Studies field have, however, been significantly damaged, paralysed, or compromised as a direct or indirect result of Trump’s policies. The field was far from perfect before this year, but its now battered state reveals a fundamentally different landscape that has undergone a profound shock.

The media domain provides dramatic examples. Radio Free Asia (RFA) was forced to lay off all its staff and shut its Uyghur, Tibetan, and fact-checking services (Kim 2025), as well as its award-winning Chinese-language media subsidiary Whynot (歪脑) (Tse 2025). China Digital Times has faced severe disruptions to its operations, which led to reduced output and my recent layoff. Mainstream media outlets such as The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CBS, and ABC—whose content includes coverage of China for general audiences—have also signalled their fealty to Trump through layoffs, financial settlements, or editorial changes to the structure of their opinion and news sections that align with his preferences (Yousif and Halpert 2025; Anguiano 2024; Stelter 2025; Folkenflik 2024).

China-related nongovernmental organisations and think tanks have also suffered under this pressure. China Labor Watch was forced to lay off seven staffers and pushed to near collapse (Chen 2025). Freedom House was forced to suspend all research for its China Dissent Monitor. The Wilson Center, whose China centre operated a fellowship program for more than a dozen scholars each year, was forced to place all employees on leave (Kavi and Wong 2025). The US Institute of Peace, which conducts numerous research projects on China, lost a battle with DOGE over control of its headquarters (Gates 2025).

Within the US Government, knowledge production related to China has likewise been severely undercut. The State Department has fired numerous China experts, gutted the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (which funded many China-related programs), and slashed more than 50 per cent of its annual human rights report on China (Amiri and Lee 2025; Roth 2025; Smith et al. 2025).

In academia, the federal government has withheld billions of dollars in funding to universities. University leaders have caved to this extortion by agreeing to alter various aspects of their governance structure to conform to the Trump administration’s ideological preferences. Columbia University, for example, placed an academic department under a new official who would control its curriculum and faculty hiring process (Reuters 2025). Cornell University and the University of Virginia signed agreements that would allow the Trump administration, ‘in its sole discretion’, to impose drastic financial penalties for noncompliance (Mayeri and Shanor 2025). Similar political interference in university governance has occurred in Florida and Texas—laboratories for the MAGA (‘Make America Great Again’) movement’s national education policies—where an asylum-seeking Chinese professor was recently fired and public university exchanges with China were outlawed (Yang 2025; Han 2025).

There is no sign that this storm will subside. With every passing day, the bounds of acceptable debate continue to shift away from independent, critical voices in all fields, including ours. In what small ways are we already self-censoring to survive? ‘Once we become submissive, thinking that [accommodation] can protect us, we still get targeted in the end … [B]eing targeted has nothing to do with content actually having an issue,’ said a journalist who was laid off from RFA (Hsu 2025). With Trump less than one year into a four-year presidential term, we would be naive to assume that the remaining China-related positions will be somehow immune to further deterioration, whether by direct intervention or knock-on effects. Meanwhile, our inaction will hasten the cooptation or elimination of our roles.

Initial Attempts to Respond

Faced with the administration’s pressure on both the China Studies field and US society more broadly, a growing number of Americans in this field have begun to speak out publicly. Commentary from the most prominent voices has fallen into three rough categories: comparative analysis, normative critique, and blueprints for resistance.

Many people in the field have looked to history to draw comparisons between Trump and Mao Zedong and between aspects of Trump’s America and China’s Cultural Revolution. These authors include Tania Branigan (2025; Colville 2025), David Lampton (Zhang et al. 2025), Orville Schell (2025), Stephen Roach (2025), Julia Lovell and Nicholas Guyatt (2025), Howard W. French (2025), and others. Journalists at CNN (Gan 2025), The New York Times (Yuan 2025), and The Economist (2025) have reported on these parallels through the perspectives of Chinese people. Similar comparisons have also been made by China experts outside the United States, including Geremie Barmé (n.d.), François Bougon (2025), and Félix Valdivieso (2025); prominent China-based figures, such as Zhang Qianfan (2025) and Wang Xiangwei (2024); and prominent non-China experts in the United States, such as Fareed Zakaria (2025), Paul Krugman (2025), and Derek Thompson (2025).

Other people in the field have not only highlighted what they consider to be similarities between the United States and China but also critiqued the authoritarian evolution of the United States. In recent pieces for ChinaFile, Michael Berry (2025) described the parallels of state censorship and repression in his classroom with those in China and called on those with privilege to fight back, while Thomas Kellogg (2025) urged the China Studies community to support Chinese activists newly laid off from their jobs in the United States and to pressure Congress to preserve our institutions. Through numerous op-eds, Yaqiu Wang (2025) has similarly drawn on her personal experience in China to repeatedly push others to stand up to Trump’s authoritarianism. In his Substack blog Unexemptional, Todd Stein (2025) has criticised US hypocrisy vis-a-vis China, which he shows has expanded under Trump. Melissa Chan and Badiucao (2025) had their new graphic novel on authoritarianism framed as ‘Hong Kong’s warning signs for America’. On social media, one can also find a growing number of critical posts by people in the China Studies field.

Some people have gone even further to create entirely new platforms specifically for responding to this moment. To quote just a couple of examples, Rory Truex started a Substack blog called The Civic Forum (2025), which draws on his experience and networks related to China to discuss how to protect US democracy from authoritarianism. Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova started a new podcast called Rhyming Chaos (n.d.), which interviews experts on authoritarian takeovers around the world, including China, and explores how to apply their lessons in the United States.

A Better Way Forward

Unfortunately, many of these critiques and initiatives do not go far enough.

Most of the existing attempts at comparison have done little more than list common aspects of authoritarianism between both countries. Without a more careful framing, they often imply that China is the only lens through which to understand current events in the United States—suggesting that we are witnessing a ‘Chinafication’ of America—and thereby obscure the fact that this rise in authoritarianism has deep domestic roots.

For instance, approaches that take only China as a lens to explain what is happening overlook how the current infrastructure of repression in the United States can be traced back through American history. Trump’s aggressive policing, immigration enforcement, and politicisation of federal power draw on older government mechanisms used to suppress groups deemed threatening to the dominant social order. To name just some examples: slavery and slave patrols (Bouie 2019), Black Codes and Jim Crow laws (Stevenson 2019), the Alien and Sedition Acts (Treisman 2025), the Red Scares and McCarthyism (Balthaser 2025), incarceration of Japanese during World War II (Cowan 2025), the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s COINTELPRO surveillance operations (King 2024), mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex (Delaney et al. 2018), and the USA PATRIOT Act and the Global War on Terror (Ackerman 2021)—all have targeted racial, gender, and political minorities to violently reinforce oppressive hierarchies using forms of fascist power in America (Toscano 2020).

If we acknowledge the domestic roots of our current plight, we must ensure that our comparative criticism of the United States and China applies to all cases of domestic repression in the United States, not simply those from the Trump administration, which we now have come to perceive as an existential threat to our field. This requires taking a longer-term, intersectional view. For instance, we cannot ignore how the Trump administration’s illiberal agenda that now demands our resistance was facilitated most recently by the Biden administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestine voices in the United States, which eroded norms of free speech and civil liberties. In the American China Studies community, very few people spoke out against those injustices at the time, and some even participated in the censorship of critical voices (Abdelhadi 2025). Even those who have created new blueprints for resistance have either publicly downplayed or remained silent on Palestine (Kaufman 2025a). Our ongoing inability to see the link between these instances of repression has contributed to our current crisis and will prevent us from resolving it (Kaufman 2025b).

Another issue is that many people in the China Studies field have placed an awkward buffer between themselves and this authoritarian elephant in the room. We are too reluctant to see ourselves as capable of influencing the political situation in the United States through our work. Perhaps due to prioritising a domestic lens over a China lens for understanding the current moment, some of us have concluded that it is not our role to tackle this problem through our work, instead resigning ourselves to only sharing an occasional social media post. Many of those who advanced comparisons between the United States and China have often hidden behind neutral framing that stops short of explicitly condemning the repression, treating it instead as some abstract academic exercise. Other critiques and initiatives have largely been limited to reactive activities on the side of our work. As our society descends rapidly into authoritarianism, the amount of our disruption to ‘business as usual’ has not been proportional to the scale of the danger posed by this administration.

To overcome these limitations, we must embed within our work a critical, intersectional, and comparative lens that illuminates the entanglements between China and the United States, insofar as our work relates to aspects of authoritarianism. Censorship, surveillance, propaganda, human rights abuses, and the political dimensions of Chinese society have glaring parallels in the United States that we are all capable of analysing and critiquing. Furthermore, we should strive to go beyond contingent manifestations of social and political phenomena to examine underpinning global structures, perhaps drawing from the approach outlined by Franceschini and Loubere in Global China as Method (2022). This would allow us to highlight not only similarities (and differences) but also interlinking dynamics that drive authoritarian practices in both countries, thereby avoiding the essentialisation of either China or the United States. The goal is not to flatten everything into a single, Sinicised teleology, to remove any context that differentiates both countries, or to eschew any domestic historical comparisons. Rather, it is to engage in the ways that we can, through the medium we know best, to illustrate the mechanisms and consequences of authoritarianism—in both countries—and encourage others to push back.

In other words, at a moment like this, it is high time for us to reconsider the meaning of our work on China. We should be asking ourselves: what does it mean if we continue producing non-reflexive, business-as-usual discussions of authoritarian-like issues in another country when our own country is undergoing an authoritarian takeover? Our siloed knowledge production of how authoritarianism manifests in China appears increasingly hollow when our own institutions in the United States are currently on fire. As people privileged with a clear understanding of how illiberalism manifests, we therefore have a role to play in shedding light on broader structures of illiberalism and injustice, beyond flattening and self-exculpatory analogies, and to do so as a deliberate act of resistance against the pervasion of these structures in the United States. Without this necessary task, the best we can hope for when our government completes its current trajectory—if we are not all eventually laid off—is to become stenographers for an illiberal regime.

Putting Up a Fight

The way to put this strategy into practice will depend on one’s position within the China Studies field. To tease out very basic examples, those in the media can focus on their formats or columns for covering news items, think tanks can focus on their programming and research, and academics can focus on their curriculum, classroom discussions, and research papers. The common output to aim for across all these domains is content that highlights and contextualises abuses of power in China and the United States using a critical, intersectional, and comparative angle. This content can be embedded within existing channels and/or new ones that still cohere with the organisation’s overall mission. We can all clearly frame these initiatives as one part of a broader project of education and resistance that must be complemented by experts in other fields. There is so much more we can do if we think creatively.

This strategy will also require rebuilding the funding structure of organisations in the China Studies field to strengthen their independence. Even before Trump, many organisations had some degree of financial dependence on the US Government and other donors that, whether explicitly or not, restricted the bounds of acceptable content and behaviour in ways that discouraged critiques of the US Government. The Trump administration’s weaponisation of these dependencies should prove how unsustainable this dynamic is—for not only our ‘normal’ operations but also our continued resistance against authoritarianism in both China and the United States.

Of course, implementing all this will depend on one’s privilege—notably, financial independence, immigration status, seniority, etcetera. The maximal version of the examples above may not be possible for everyone. However, individuals at every level of hierarchy pay some price for critiquing abuses of power. Everyone must decide for themselves in good faith where their limit lies. When we introspect, we can all admit there is likely more that we can be doing. Collective action is imperative, and every act of resistance inspires another. It may also be easier to take these small actions now than potentially have no choice of action in a more restricted future.

We can draw inspiration from those of us in the community who have not shied away from making these critical comparisons, even when they were unpopular or costly. Rui Zhong (n.d.), who was fired by a prominent American think tank for her advocacy on Palestine, writes regularly about the intersection of Chinese and American politics. Yangyang Cheng (2024a; 2024b) has eloquently described how systems of oppression in the United States and China are intertwined through shared political and corporate forces that control the bounds of academic freedom. Risking their futures amid heightened immigration scrutiny and police repression, Chinese students at American universities have voiced their support for the pro-Palestine encampment movement by connecting transnational struggles against oppression under the banner ‘No-one’s free until everyone’s free’ (Kaufman 2024).

Their bravery should remind us of why we are working in this field. In addition to our passion for the subject, all of us, no matter where our niche lies in this larger ecosystem, want the fruits of our labour to contribute to a better, more just world. As the United States descends further into authoritarianism, let us at least recognise our agency and put up a fight.

Featured Image: No Kings protest on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. on October 18, 2025. Source: Farragutful, Wikimedia Commons (CC)

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