“Communism, China & Senator Cotton’s New Book” Sydney Williams
“I have seen the future, and it works” – words written by Lincoln Steffens following a visit to the newly formed Soviet Union in 1918. Last year, while in Shanghai for a store opening, Apple CEO Tim Cook was obsequious in his praise of China: “I think China is really opening up…it’s so vibrant and so dynamic.”
For more than a hundred years many, supposedly perceptive Western geopolitical analysts, journalists and business leaders, have chosen to ignore the evil that is Communism. In his 1919 book, Ten Days that Shook the World, American journalist John Reed, scion of a wealthy Oregon family, wrote sympathetically of the Russian Revolution that he had witnessed in Petrograd. Warren Beatty turned the book into a 1981 film, Reds, nominated for an Academy Award. In 1937, after spending months with Mao Tse Tung’s Red Army, American journalist Edgar Snow wrote Red Star Over China, a glowing portrait of life in Communist areas. He contrasted his experience with Mao and his Communist followers with his depiction of the gloom and corruption of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang’s government, which relocated to Taiwan in 1949.
For Americans, Communism has never approached the revulsion felt for Nazism, yet the similarities are far greater than their differences. In the February 5, 2018 issue of The New York Review of Books, Ian Johnson responded to an earlier article by Timothy Snyder, “Who Killed More, Hitler or Stalin?” Johnson wrote that the question was slightly off: “…it should have included a third tyrant of the 20th Century, Chairman Mao. And not just that, but that Mao should have been the hands-down winner, with his ledger easily trumping the European dictators’.” According to his research, Stalin killed somewhere between 6 and 9 million people, Hitler between 11 and 12 million, and Mao between 35 and 45 million, most during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Nazism and Communism both practice(d) genocide, are (were) authoritarian, and have (had) no regard for individual rights or human life.
Repression and intimidation in China did not end with Mao’s death in 1976. While accurate numbers are not available, estimates of those killed in 1989’s uprising in Tiananmen Square range from a few hundred to several thousand. Since Xi Jinping became President of the People’s Republic of China in 2013 more than a million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang Province have been placed in internment camps. No one claims to know how many have died. The province has a population of 24 million, half of whom are Uyghurs, so almost one in ten Uyghurs have been confined. The BBC has reported that Uyghur women have been sterilized, and former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has called what has happened in the province “genocide and crimes against humanity.” In a review of Emily Feng’s book Let Only Red Flowers Bloom, Maura Elizabeth Cunningham wrote in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal: “Under Mr. Xi, the definition of what makes a person ‘Chinese’ has become increasingly narrow: someone who exclusively speaks Mandarin, marries Chinese and has two or three children, respects the leadership of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), accepts censorship and surveillance and recalibrates in accordance with each new political campaign…” In the Introduction to his new book, Voice for the Voiceless, the Dalai Lama wrote about Communism and Tibet, which he was forced to leave in 1959: “The issue is not about the matter of economic development…The issue is about a people’s need and right to exist with their distinct language, culture, and religious heritage.” An impossible dream for Tibetan Buddhists in China today.
China has a population of about 1.4 billion, of whom about 100 million (or 7%) are members of the Communist Party, the second largest political party in the world (in a one-party state!), but one not open to all. Officers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) are members, but most enlisted soldiers are not. While China, according to official statistics, has the world’s second largest economy, as measured by GDP ($18.8 trillion versus the U.S. at $28.2 trillion, its GDP per capita is $13,400 versus the U.S. at $83,000. Indicative of its concentration of wealth, China has, according to the Hunan Global Rich List, 814 billionaires, more than the U.S. That number, according to the Washington Times, includes Xi Jinping, who has never worked in the private sector. Mr. Xi has been hailed for eradicating poverty in China, but, as Bitter Winter (a European magazine that focuses on religious liberty and human rights) has stated: “Xi Jinping is a master in the Orwellian art to redefine the meaning of words to suit his propaganda.” In 2021, he put poverty at below $2.30 per day. The issue of how many Chinese fall below the poverty line was raised before Xi Jinping’s presidency, in Will the Boat Sink the Water? by Chen Guidi’s and Wu Chuntao, published in 2004.
China represents a clear and present risk to Western liberalism – economically, militarily and culturally. 150 countries, representing three quarters of the world’s population and over half of the world’s GDP have signed Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China’s banks – backed by the CCP – have funded projects, including railroads, ports and gas pipelines in countries in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Latin America. Sean Thomas, in the April edition of The Spectator, wrote: “China is now the biggest trading partner for virtually every South American nation, supplanting the U.S. in the last decade.” While their military budget is less than ours (assuming we can believe their numbers), their standing army is twice ours – the largest army in the world. China has constructed artificial islands and military installations in the South China Sea, through which travel one third of all global maritime trade. In the 2022-2023 academic year, American universities enrolled almost 290,000 Chinese students, while 800 Americans studied at Chinese universities.
It is with that background, and at the suggestion of an old skiing buddy, that I picked up and read Senator Tom Cotton’s short but information-packed book, Seven Things You Can’t Say About China. Reading it convinced me of what I long suspected – China is an evil empire and the U.S. needs to be prepared. In seven concise chapters, covering 170 pages, Senator Cotton instructs the reader on how China is preparing for war, how they wage economic war, how they infiltrate society and are coming for our kids, and how they might actually win. In a telling example, and quoting PEW Research Center, he relates that in 2020 9% of young American adults got their news from Chinese-owned TikTok; today, 39% do. He starts off chapter VII, “China Could Win:” “Most of us take American global dominance for granted, without thinking much about it; since at least World War I, that’s just the way it’s been.” Complacency has become nemesis.
If you believe, as I do, that most people, regardless of heritage or cultural background, prefer liberty to dependency, this is a book you should read. The West, led by the United States, is an advocate for the former, while China exemplifies the latter. In the U.S., we command our fortunes, and we control our futures. The vast majority of Chinese, living under the tyranny of a dictatorship, control neither their fortunes nor their futures. We cannot let them win.
In the March 16, 2025 issue of The Telegraph, senior foreign correspondent Roland Oliphant wrote: “China, not Russia, is the only country on the planet capable of challenging the United States’ military, economic and political hegemony.” Caveat emptor should apply when dealing with Communist China.
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