In 1966, at just 13 years old, the son of poor farmers became one of Mao’s Red Guards. He joined millions of young people across China to participate in the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long upheaval set off by an aging Mao to reassert his absolute control over the ruling Communist Party – with the stated goal of preserving communist ideology.
Nearly six decades later, Ding is a distinguished scholar of Chinese politics based in Hong Kong, with a PhD from Harvard and a career teaching about the catastrophic movement he embraced. But in recent months, he has begun to see uncanny echoes of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in an unexpected place: Donald Trump’s America.
