When Vickie Wang, a budding standup comedian, gets on stage in New York, she’s not just thinking about what jokes to crack. She’s also thinking about which ones to avoid. “I don’t criticise the administration directly,” she said. Or if she does, she makes sure it’s not recorded for social media. “I would never publicly publish something where I directly criticise the government … I think it’s a learned behaviour from China”.
Wang, 39, lived in Shanghai for nearly a decade, leaving in 2022. In 2025 she relocated to the US. When she arrived, she went on a frenzy of “revenge bingeing on democracy”, going to talks, protests and diving into New York’s public library.
