“Make America Great Again” and “Never let the Century of Humiliation return” are the slogans of two opposed superpower governments – producing one unsettling convergence.
These are the ideological battle cries of the United States and the People’s Republic of China – each invoking a grand civilizational mission to justify extraordinary state power. Beneath this geopolitical theater lies a shared strategy: Both MAGA-style authoritarianism and China’s nationalist revivalism have co-opted the rhetoric of public interest to justify surveillance, censorship and the suppression of dissent, while suppressing the public’s right to speak for itself.
On June 14, demonstrators across the US rallied under the banner “No Kings,” rejecting what they saw as authoritarian overreach under the Trump 2.0 administration. Protesters challenged the surveillance state, creeping censorship and politicized law enforcement.
Civil liberties groups decried creeping executive power, while digital activists broadcast their dissent through livestreams and encrypted chats.
The response was swift: unmarked federal agents, digital surveillance and coordinated efforts to discredit and delegitimize the movement.
A familiar pattern has emerged where dissent is framed as extremism, and protest as threat.
Digital outrage in China: the case of Dr. Luo Shuaiyu
Thousands of miles away, another protest has unfolded – not in the streets, but across a vast digital terrain. Chinese netizens have erupted in outrage over the death of Dr. Luo Shuaiyu, a young intern surgeon at Xiangya Second Hospital who allegedly exposed illicit organ harvesting practices implicating senior hospital officials before dying under suspicious circumstances.
After his May 8, 2024, death was labeled a suicide by the sanitized official provincial official narrative, despite troubling evidence to the contrary, citizens turned to digital forums to demand truth and justice. Luo’s story, like the earlier case of missing teen Hu Xinyu, became a lightning rod for public grief, anger, and forensic online investigation.
Hashtags, screenshots, voice notes and digital sleuthing kept his memory alive even as censors tried to erase it. On Chinese platforms including WeChat and Weibo, netizens mobilized to generate their own narratives in response to the lack of credibility they perceived in the official account of the doctor’s sudden death.
His story, like so many others – from Hu Xinyu’s disappearance to past vaccine scandals – became a catalyst for a digitally-driven reckoning with the state’s moral authority.
Rights-based advocacy vs. state-led narratives
In China, this takes the form of rights-based advocacy for “Dao” (Changdao, 倡道). While the interest-based advocacy under Party’s control (Changdao,倡导) – state-led ideological guidance – remains dominant, digital spaces have opened new channels for citizens to assert moral claims, circulate forensic counter-narratives, and amplify injustice.
In Luo’s case, fragments of voice recordings, hospital screenshots and encrypted group chats were enough to bypass censorship and spark mass questioning. Online outrage became a kind of public referendum – one that the government could not ignore, even as it moved to erase, suppress or redirect the conversation.
MAGA, ICE and the authoritarian drift in US immigration policy
In the United States, the MAGA narrative has done more than reshape electoral politics. It has become a blueprint for state overreach under the guise of immigration enforcement. Agencies such as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) have increasingly acted as autonomous arms of ideological policy, empowered not just to detain and deport but to surveil, intimidate, and over-police immigrant communities.
Under Trump’s 2.0 administration, ICE has not only expanded its detention infrastructure but blurred the line between civil immigration proceedings and criminal enforcement. The agency now mirrors the very logic of authoritarian policing: using opaque watchlists, secret evidence and vague national security claims to justify raids, detentions, and prolonged surveillance.
While presented as a “public interest” defense of national sovereignty, this campaign routinely ignores rights-based advocacy, silencing immigrant voices and bypassing due process. Just as China’s public interest rhetoric masks political control, MAGA’s immigration agenda uses patriotism to conceal systemic injustice.
Inter-network society: a new civic terrain
Across the Pacific from each other, two governments – one claiming democratic legitimacy, the other insisting on single-party stability – are confronting a shared challenge: the rise of digitally empowered, rights-based public advocacy. From the United States’ “No Kings” protests to viral outrage over the suspicious death of Dr. Luo Shuaiyu in China, citizens are resisting state narratives using the very tools once designed to control them.
These protests—one physical, one digital—are not isolated. These two seemingly disconnected events – one anchored in American civil liberties, the other in Chinese public health scandal – share a deeper infrastructure. They both illuminate the power and signal the emergence of what I call an inter-network society: a transnational digital public sphere where global digital platforms enable ordinary citizens, armed with smart phones and moral outrage, engaged in distributed forms of civic engagement that challenge state-imposed narratives.
Top-down narratives, bottom-up resistance
But this emerging civic infrastructure faces a dual pressure: one from traditional authoritarian censorship, and another from ideological capture – in which “public interest” becomes whatever serves state goals.
In both countries, governments present themselves as defenders of a public good. In China, it is “national rejuvenation” – a tightly managed story of unity, sacrifice, and historical destiny. In the US, it is MAGA’s restoration fantasy – evoking a purified past to rationalize hardline policies in the present.
Both narratives appropriate the function of public advocacy, framing dissenters as traitors, radicals or foreign agents.
What gets erased in this process is rights-based advocacy. This form of public engagement draws from moral, legal, and civic principles to hold power accountable. While the interest-based advocacy under the Communists Party’s control – state-led ideological guidance – remains dominant, digital spaces have opened new channels for citizens to assert moral claims, circulate forensic counter-narratives, and amplify injustice.
In Luo’s case, fragments of voice recordings, hospital screenshots, and encrypted group chats were enough to bypass censorship and spark mass questioning. Online outrage became a kind of public referendum – one that the government could not ignore, even as it moved to erase, suppress or redirect the conversation. It is messy, often uncomfortable and politically inconvenient. And that is exactly why it matters.
This is more than spontaneous protest. Rights-based digital activism has taken the form of forensic public engagement: citizens compiling timelines, documenting abuses, and demanding accountability for the truth underneath the death of figures like Dr. Luo.
Though heavily censored, this grassroots movement constitutes an incipient counter-power. Although the state retains control over laws, infrastructure, and coercive force, these digital publics insert new variables into governance: a demand for legitimacy, a challenge to propaganda, and a capacity for decentralized accountability. For now, it does not seek to overthrow the system, but to negotiate with it, expanding the space for justice within an otherwise tightly controlled ecosystem.
The convergence of repression – and resistance
In the new era of ideological policing, between the emerging digital resistance and the fragility of rights-based advocacy lies the paradox: Both regimes treat public interest as something to be defined from the top down, not claimed from the bottom up. Under whatever banner – national security, civilizational revival or cultural greatness – both of the states now position themselves as the exclusive interpreter of “the people’s will”—while undermining the people’s voice.
In the US, the rise of surveillance, “lawfare” and state-led counter-disinformation campaigns reveals how dissent is increasingly framed as destabilization. There’s a tendency to believe that constitutional protections shield people from the worst abuses of power.
But the “No Kings” protests reveal a troubling convergence: militarized policing, retaliatory surveillance and the erosion of civil discourse. Even in such a formal democracy, dissenters face digital tracking, criminalization and marginalization – not dissimilar in structure to their counterparts, the authoritarian regimes they claim to oppose. Whether in Beijing or in Washington, the state is learning to police not just individuals but information ecosystems.
Dissent in the digital age: a global reckoning
And yet, the people persist. And the public is learning, too. Thus, this is a nuanced and urgent call to defend public truth from the ground up. It is assembling evidence, forming alliances and refusing to be gaslit into submission.
What unites the stories of Luo Shuaiyu, Hu Xinyu, and the “No Kings” protestors is not ideology but method. Digital advocacy – especially in its rights-based form – has become a crucial lever of engagement. It may not yet dismantle structural power, but it undeniably reshapes its contours.
What’s new are the transnational logic of repression and the global, networked resistance it has provoked. If there is hope, it lies in the connective tissue of our time: the inter-networked public sphere.
It is imperfect, fragmented, and surveilled – but it remains a space where people, across borders and regimes, still ask the hardest questions: Who decides what truth is? Who benefits from silence? Who speaks for justice? And most importantly: Who dares to dissent? It’s a digitally connected society that resists monologue with dialogue, propaganda with documentation, erasure with remembrance,
The challenge ahead is not simply one of state versus society. It is about who gets to define truth, and how. In both China and the US, people are witnessing an epistemological battle – between authoritarian certainty and democratic doubt, between managed silence and messy transparency.
The advocates persist by reclaiming the power through physical demonstration also the digital lifelines, the encrypted circles and the fragmented solidarity of the global internet.
A digitally connected society now resists monologue with dialogue, propaganda with documentation and erasure with remembrance. This is the frontier of public life in the 21st century: where networked publics must confront not only authoritarian power but the seductive narratives that claim to speak in their name.
To Dr. Luo – and to the countless unnamed advocates across borders who dare to ask inconvenient questions and keep disguised truths alive – we salute you. The people’s truth cannot be twisted. It echoes through silence, reassembles through fragments, and survives every attempt to erase it.
Yujing Shentu, PhD, is an independent scholar and writer on digital politics, international political economy and US-China strategic competition.
