Ding Xueliang spent his early teenage years in China as a fervent believer and practitioner of Chairman Mao Zedong’s revolutionary ideals — but he never imagined those memories would one day be stirred by a sitting US president. 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…
