Journalist who fled Mao’s China explains why the mayor-elect’s democratic socialism bears no resemblance to the authoritarianism she escaped
From Mao’s China to Mamdani’s New York: Understanding the Difference
When a viral TikTok video showed Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani responding to a heckler calling him “Communist” with the quip “It’s pronounced cyclist,” it earned him millions of views and widespread praise. But for Chinese immigrants who lived through Mao Zedong’s brutal socialist regime, the joke didn’t land quite as lightly. The fear is real, rooted in lived experience of property seizure, class persecution, and economic devastation.
Rong Xiaoqing, a New York-based journalist born in mid-1970s China during the twilight of Mao’s reign, offers a unique perspective that challenges the panic. Writing for The Boston Globe, she draws on her family’s history of losing their pharmacy business and home during China’s Land Reform Movement to argue that Mamdani’s democratic socialist platform bears no resemblance to the authoritarianism that destroyed her family’s livelihood.
The Trauma of True Socialism
Xiaoqing’s family story illustrates the brutal reality of Mao’s “socialism.” Her great-grandfather He Yichen founded the first Western-medicine pharmacy in Shijiazhuang in the 1920s, building it into a successful chain. During the 1950s Land Reform and Public-Private Partnership campaigns, the Communist government seized the business and confiscated half their courtyard home, cramming multiple families into spaces once occupied by a single household.
Despite losing their property, her family remained labeled “capitalist” during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), limiting employment opportunities for generations. Her mother, formerly a museum guide, was relegated to factory labor. “Although major living costs were covered by the government, everyone was poor,” Xiaoqing recalls. Apartments went unlocked “not so much because they trusted their neighbors but because there was nothing to steal.”
The system’s fundamental flaw wasn’t welfare benefits but economic structure. State-owned factories guaranteed lifetime employment with children inheriting parents’ positions, eliminating incentive for productivity. The socialist concept that “everything belongs to the people” fostered widespread theft of factory products, with security guards complicit because they too were “the people.”
Mamdani’s Proposals: Reform, Not Revolution
Comparing Mamdani’s platform to Mao’s regime reveals stark contrasts. The mayor-elect’s proposed four-year rent freeze for one million rent-stabilized apartments would impact landlord profits but involves no property seizure. According to the Community Service Society of New York, nearly half of rent-stabilized tenants already pay over one-third of their income in rent, with 22 percent behind on payments. The freeze addresses crisis-level unaffordability in a city where housing instability threatens to displace working families.
President Trump labeled Mamdani a “communist” during the campaign, and the House passed a resolution denouncing “the horrors of socialism” the same day the two met cordially at the White House. Representative Nicole Malliotakis characterized Mamdani’s agenda as desiring “the very things” that led to Mao’s poverty-ridden China. Yet Xiaoqing sees fundamental differences.
“While Mamdani’s plan for a four-year rent freeze may cut into landlords’ profits, it has no similarity to Mao’s radical seizure of private property,” she writes. “Instead, it’s a cushion in a city where a rampant housing crisis leaves close to half of rent-stabilized tenants paying more than one-third of their income in rent.”
Lessons from China’s Economic Evolution
Xiaoqing notes that Deng Xiaoping’s post-Mao economic reforms brought China prosperity through private sector commitment and market competition–mechanisms “firmly embedded in the DNA of New York City from the beginning.” Mamdani shows no intention of throttling capitalism, nor could he in America’s largest business hub.
Ironically, some Mamdani proposals echo contemporary Chinese capitalism rather than Mao-era socialism. High-tech companies like Tencent and Alibaba offer employees free medical care, commuter buses, meals, and housing subsidies–perks adopted from Silicon Valley to retain talent. China’s recent experiment with community canteens providing affordable meals sparked concerns about returning to Maoism, but Xiaoqing found them indistinguishable from regular restaurants, subject to market forces rather than ideological mandate.
Mamdani’s proposed government-sponsored grocery stores would likely function similarly. “There is no reason to doubt that Mamdani’s idea of government-sponsored grocery stores would be different–if they are not able to provide competitive services to New Yorkers, they’ll simply die rather than being kept as broken tokens of an ideology,” Xiaoqing argues.
Addressing the Billionaire Flight Myth
Critics warn that taxing the wealthy will drive billionaires from New York, creating revenue shortfalls. However, research from the Fiscal Policy Institute analyzing tax data found that the top 1 percent of earners in New York State are less likely to move than everyone else–a pattern that held even after the state raised taxes on the rich in 2021. The data contradicts fears that progressive taxation will empty New York’s coffers.
Among middle-aged and older Chinese immigrants, fears have intensified since Mamdani’s election. Online conversations evoke Mao’s slogan “Bring down the bourgeoisie, redistribute the land” to describe the supposed nightmare ahead. A YouTube video attributing Mamdani’s victory to Chinese Communist Party manipulation garnered 170,000 views in five days. One friend told Xiaoqing: “I fled China. I fled Hong Kong. Where else can I flee to?”
A Social Democrat, Not a Communist
Xiaoqing’s conclusion challenges the panic: “The incoming mayor of New York doesn’t look like a communist or socialist to me, at least not in the scary forms I have seen. He looks more like a European-style social democrat running a largely capitalist city with some socialist tinges. To me he looks much like, as he said himself, a ‘cyclist.’ He could take the city in different directions, but no one can ride a bike backward.”
Her perspective matters because it comes from lived experience of actual totalitarian socialism. While Mamdani’s membership in the Democratic Socialists of America confuses those unfamiliar with the distinction between democratic socialism and authoritarian communism, Xiaoqing sees “zero risk” that his policies will bring New York anywhere near Mao’s China’s dysfunction.
The mayor-elect’s platform–rent freezes, universal childcare, free bus service–represents safety net expansion within capitalism, not capitalism’s abolition. New York’s entrepreneurial energy and competitive markets aren’t under threat. What Mamdani proposes is using government power to make the world’s most expensive city livable for working people, an approach more aligned with Scandinavian social democracy than Chinese communism.
As Xiaoqing notes, her mother “had only high regard” for Deng Xiaoping, who brought prosperity through economic reform after Mao’s devastation. The lesson isn’t that all government intervention equals disaster, but that market mechanisms combined with social protections can improve lives–precisely what Mamdani’s “affordability agenda” attempts to achieve in a city where housing costs have reached crisis levels.
For Chinese New Yorkers haunted by memories of Mao’s regime, the distinction matters enormously. Understanding that distinction requires recognizing the vast difference between totalitarian seizure of private property and democratic regulation of markets to ensure working people can afford to live in the city they help build.
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