Will Xi Succeed Where Mao Failed? 

The Chinese Communist Party is “an enemy of humanity.” So declared former Chinese political prisoner, Chen Guangcheng, at the Republican National Convention back in August of 2020. “In China, expressing beliefs or ideas not approved by the CCP—religion, democracy, human rights—can lead to prison. The nation lives under mass surveillance and censorship.”

Chen would know. The self-taught legal scholar and activist was formally arrested in 2006 for protesting against government-forced abortions and sterilization.

After spending four years in a prison run by the Chinese Communist Party, the blind Chen was returned home, but was illegally kept under house arrest. He and his wife were often beaten. The government covered their windows with sheet metal. Their electricity was shut off. Their means of communication—and even their daughter’s toys—were confiscated. Chen and his family desperately wanted to escape the brutally oppressive Communist regime, and in 2011 they attempted to tunnel out of the house. Unfortunately, the guards discovered the tunnel and filled it back in.

A year later, they came up with a different plan. Pretending to be extremely ill, Chen was able to lower his captors’ guard, slip out of the house and out of the perimeter. He was then transported almost four hundred miles to Beijing—miraculously evading China’s enormous security apparatus—and taken to the U.S. Embassy, which granted him asylum.

Chen’s harrowing escape reads like a Cold War spy novel, but it didn’t happen during the Cold War. Chen escaped China in 2012. This is especially frightening, because many in our media, corporate, entertainment, religious, and political spheres prefer to side with the oppressive Communist regime over the leaders and interests of the United States. The reason why has become clear. The West has been completely infiltrated by the Chinese Communist Party.

Everyone can see the deference American and other Western corporations give to the CCP—a deference not even given to their own nations. The atrocities committed against Uighur Muslims and others is largely ignored by corporate executives, media elites, and overpaid celebrities, even as they lecture the United States for sins that have not been committed in over a century. I suspect this is largely because of the barrels of money the Chinese throw at them, but recently we learned that this fealty is due to more than just greed.

According to a recent report by Australia’s Sky News, a data breach has revealed that the CCP has nearly two million communist operatives throughout the West, many in large corporations, but some also in government positions. According to the report, these operatives are directly answerable to the CCP and Xi Jinping.

Another expose in a British tabloid, the Daily Mail, states that these Chinese communists swear an oath to “guard Party secrets, be loyal to the Party, work hard, fight for communism throughout my life… and never betray the Party.” Further, “Beijing’s malign influence now stretches into almost every corner of British life, including defense firms, banks and pharmaceutical giants.”

It’s not just Australia and the United Kingdom that are infected with the CCP virus, either. The United States is, too.

Of course, this probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone. After all, we know the Chinese are spying on and trying to influence the United States—just as we are doing to them. In fact, a recent FBI sting uncovered the scandal of a Chinese spy who is allegedly having an affair with a sitting U.S. congressman, Eric Swalwell. There have been allegations of corruption between the CCP and the Biden family.

Yet the breadth of this infiltration—and the lack of concern that too many Americans, especially the media elites has for this scandal—is stunning. It demonstrates how effective the CCP has been at covering their tracks.

Any schoolchild can tell you that Adolf Hitler and his Nazis were evil murderers who executed millions of people, but how many even know who Mao Zedong was? How many know how brutal Mao and the Communist Party were (and still are) to their own people? The Chinese Communists are responsible for the deaths of more innocent men, women, and children than Hitler and Stalin combined.

The Chinese Communists have never cared much for human life. During their revolution, they not only brutally executed their enemies, but even buried their own soldiers alive. Once the Communists took control of the country, they used the same brutality against their own people. “Some of our comrades have too much mercy, not enough brutality, which means they are not so Marxist,” Mao told his senior officials. “We indeed have no conscience! Marxism is that brutal.”

The CCP has sought to control the entire world since it took over China. “We must control the Earth!” Mao told his inner circle in 1956, and to that end he instigated his Great Leap Forward, a program to modernize the country, especially the military. To purchase weapons from the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries, the Chinese paid in food. However, to get enough food to trade for weapons, Chinese peasants were deprived of food. Millions of Chinese starved to death.

“People say poverty is bad, but in fact poverty is good,” Mao asserted. “The poorer people are, the more revolutionary they are. It is dreadful to imagine a time when everyone will be rich.” According to historians Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their bestselling book Mao: The Unknown Story, Chinese peasants were often fed less than the Jewish prisoners at the Auschwitz death camp. Starving peasants who tried to “steal” the food they had grown themselves faced terrible consequences. Children had their fingers chopped off, and adults had their noses chopped off. Some peasants were strangled to death and others were buried alive. Some were so hungry that they even turned to cannibalism. And while the people were being starved, they were also being worked to death like slaves.

Between 30 and 40 million Chinese died of starvation, exposure, and over-exertion due to the Communist policies. “There should be celebration rallies when people die,” Mao asserted. “If people don’t die, the earth won’t be able to hold them!” This was a common theme for Mao, who believed that killing was the best way to maintain control. “Eastern Europe just didn’t kill on a grand scale,” he said. He had no qualms about allowing half of the population of China to die in order to win a war against the West. “We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of the world revolution,” he proclaimed.

Mao died in 1976, and by 1978 the country was slowly reforming his horrible policies. In 1979, the United States opened up diplomatic relations with Communist China. In the 1980s, the Chinese Communists declared they wanted peace instead of worldwide revolution. And with Chinese economic reforms came trade and investment with Western powers. Religious faiths were recognized by the government. The press was given some freedoms.

China was hardly a bastion of liberty, however. There were still limits on the press, religion, and speech. Abortions and sterilizations were forced upon citizens by the government, and workers often labored in conditions no better than slavery. The government also violently repressed dissent, as the entire world witnessed in 1989, with the slaughter of thousands of protestors in Tiananmen Square by the Chinese military. Despite all of this, however, the West felt China’s Communist Party had come a long way since the brutal dictatorship of Mao.

Then, in 2012, Xi Jinping became the Paramount Leader of China. Just like Mao, Mr. Xi quickly consolidated his power and increased the Communist Party’s control over the country.

Under Mr. Xi, China is returning to its Maoist past. Xi has made no secret about this and has even declared, “If we lose Mao, we lose the party’s glorious history.” As Julia Lovell noted in her September 6, 2019 article for the Financial Times, Mr. Xi’s “lionization of the Maoist model… deploys the methods of a secretive, intolerant Marxist-Leninist organization to deal with liberal political alternatives in Hong Kong, and with China’s ethnically and religiously diverse north-western borderlands.”

Indeed, more than a million Uighur Muslims and other minorities have been loaded onto train cars and sent to concentration camps, there to be tortured, raped, and reeducated. They, too, suffer forced labor, abortions, and sterilizations. Meanwhile, in once free Hong Kong, protests have been violently repressed, and a new National Security Law curtails basic rights while turning the city into a police state.

The immediate threat to the United States and the rest of the world is not the horrors China commits at home, but its growing influence abroad. Mao always wanted to dominate the world, but he never came close. In fact, under Mao, China never even dominated East Asia.

With China’s rise as an economic power over the last few decades, all of that has changed. China will continue to become an increasingly dominant force, and the repressive attitudes of its Communist leadership pose a real threat to global freedom. The infiltration and buying off of corporations, media companies, celebrities, and even entire nations has already given the CCP too much influence over the free peoples of the world.

Chen Guangcheng is correct when he calls the Chinese Communists “an enemy of humanity.” If the CCP achieves global hegemony, the world will suffer terribly. Mr. Xi and the CCP must be stopped, and that begins with awakening the world—particularly the Church—to the threat Communist China poses to freedom and life everywhere. If we’re to triumph over this evil regime, Christ’s Church must be at the forefront of the battle. This war, like all wars, is not just physical in nature, but spiritual. Without the Lord’s protective hand, we have no hope; but with the Lord on our side, none can stand against us.

[Photo credit: Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images]