American Thought Leaders - The Bewildering Amnesia of America’s Elite: Bradley Thayer

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

In this episode, Bradley Thayer exposes the workings of the Chinese regime’s political and ideological warfare. He’s the director of China policy at the Center for Security Policy and author of ��Understanding the China Threat.”What makes TikTok a particularly potent weapon? And how should the United States approach the Chinese regime?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The CCP is admired by at least a segment of the American elite. Perhaps some of the 400 who were at that dinner admire the CCP for its efficiency, as Bill Gates has said. In this episode, Bradley Thayer exposes the workings of the Chinese regime's political and ideological warfare. He's the director of China policy at the Center for Security Policy and author of Understanding the China Threat. What makes TikTok a particularly potent weapon? What you have done is just given the Communist Party of China access to you and the ability to influence you in elections, the ability to influence you in your political behavior,

in your beliefs, in how you see the rest of the world. And how should the U.S. approach the Chinese regime? If we recognize the nature of the threat and its tremendous vulnerabilities and exploit those vulnerabilities, we can defeat them just as we did the Soviet Union. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Dr. Bradley Thayer, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. It's my pleasure to join you. Over the last few years, we've been exposed to a lot of very, very good information.

I'm talking about the American public, yet I'm not convinced that we're behaving as a society. And when I say that, I'm talking about the West, not just the US. We're not really behaving in a way that would suggest that there's a serious threat. Let's start there. What do you think about that? We're not. I agree with you. We're not treating the Chinese Communist Party as the enemy that they are of Western civilization, of governments around the world, and of people also within China and around the world. We're not treating them as the enemy, but instead attempting to sustain the engagement school, attempting to ensure that by trade with them,

by investment in the Chinese Communist Party, by making them stronger and allowing them to remain in power, that we'll be able to change their behavior and they'll become more benign rather than the tyrannical government that they are. So it's a deep problem. It has penetrated the Pentagon, the intelligence community, every facet of the U.S. government, of Congress, of our media, of universities, business communities, of course, Wall Street, Silicon Valley. It's a profound

problem and it must change. The survival of the United States depends on recognizing that the CCP is the enemy of the United States and of American values, of American principles, and it must be seen as such. I really appreciate how you made the point of distinguishing between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people. Perhaps one of the most powerful pieces of propaganda, and there are a great many powerful pieces of the propaganda that the CCP employs, is to conflate itself with the Chinese people. It always says, you're going to hurt the feelings of the Chinese people if you do X or Y, and so forth. And that, I think, we've internalized to some extent. Certainly, the Chinese people have internalized. And you talk about in your book how the Chinese people

aren't necessarily going to go along with the CCP. What portion of the population, do you have a sense of this, is actually clearly can delineate itself against the CCP? Well, the party says it has about 96 million members. And let's assume that that's true. And let's assume that a big chunk of those 96 million are there just because they have to be for reasons of career. So perhaps half of those individuals are diehards. But sadly, to run a tyranny, you only need a small number of individuals who are willing to act ruthlessly to impose their vision, their tyranny on the society. Your point is an excellent one.

The CCP does its utmost to link itself to the Chinese people, but also to the greatness of Chinese civilization, which of course is incoherent. The CCP is a communist government. It is a Leninist government. Leninism has nothing to do with China or Chinese civilization. It's a Western import, the CCP, and it should be seen as such. It's incoherent in terms of Chinese history, and it was able to come to power because of Joseph Stalin and the Communist International. And it stays in power as a result of the tyranny of Mao and subsequent leaders. And so when we look at that, we need to understand it, that this is a Western artifact imposed and holding back the greatness of Chinese civilization

and the Chinese people. And so we need to recognize as well that they're not allowing votes, right? They're not allowing essentially any type of feedback in terms of how popular are they, how much support do they generate, do they actually possess among the Chinese people? And when you look at it, and particularly look at the example of Taiwan, it's quite clear that the Chinese people would be far better off country, and frankly in the West, I've been alerted, or I guess I understand at the deeper level, the power of propaganda. I didn't grasp it. Of course, in these communist societies, especially communist China, the level of propaganda and deliberate indoctrination is incredibly high, and some people are susceptible

to that. How prominent do you think in Chinese people's minds, based on what you know? And I know, for example, your co-author has deep insight into the Chinese population. How many people are actually free in some way of that ideology? CCP is well aware of the importance, as you identified, of ideology of indoctrination. But it also has to be forced upon the Chinese people because it is incoherent, really, in the Chinese circumstance, in the Chinese condition. I think it's also, too, the tools that they use. One of our interviewees said that, in essence, the high technology, the fact that it is a surveillance superpower, the CCP has incredible tools to surveil you, means that it was high technology that saved the CCP's behind, right? In essence,

he put it in more colorful terms, but that's the essence of it. It is the fact of social credit score, the fact that they monitor you constantly puts you in a state of perpetual fear. You're in that Foucaultian, the panopticon that Foucault identified, right? And we're policing ourselves because we believe we're always monitored. And so that has a very powerful effect. You're not going along with it for reasons of ideology. You're mouthing the terminology in a way that Orwell identified, for example, or that we are very familiar, of course, with the Soviet experience, of course, and Soviet tyranny. You're going through the motions,

but you do not believe it. You're being educated in that way, but you do not believe it. And that's a profound vulnerability of the party that could be very usefully exploited by the diaspora and others as well. But couple that with advanced technology, AI and the fact that they can surveil you 24-7 and are not shy about using their tools against your family members, gives them very powerful mechanisms to stay in power, which is why we suggest in the book a critical factor for freeing the Chinese people from the tyranny of the CCP is to find a way to break permanently the Great Firewall, to be able to ensure that the Chinese people are able to liberate themselves from the surveillance state and access, if you will, the global internet.

Some people are just saying China's a competitor under the Chinese Communist Party. It's not an enemy. You say it's the most important enemy that seeks to kill us, if I recall from our last interview you actually said. So show me the most powerful, of evidence is communist thoughts. To understand the role of the West, the role of the United States in communist thought, from Lenin through Stalin to Mao to today, Xi Jinping is a communist, and he takes that ideology very seriously. This is a ruler who takes ideas, communist ideas in particular, very seriously. And he sees the world, as we document in the book, through that lens, which has shaped him from the time he was a young man, both profiting and also suffering from Mao's tyranny until today. So for communism, the West is the barrier that needs to be destroyed. If the United States in particular were eliminated, China would be able, the PRC would be able to get what it wants from the rest of the world.

So if you understand communist thought, I think that's very important. Related to that is what he says. If you look at essentially what is coming out of Xi Jinping's mouth, the declaration of people's war in 2019 against the United States, asking the Chinese people to steel themselves for a period of war, a period of great suffering against the United States, difficult times are coming, which has only been reinforced since then. And then that would be fine if China were weak. Lots of folks might hate the United States, but if they don't have the

power, that's a separate issue. China has the power because it has grown from 1990, about 1.6 percent of world gross domestic product, to, say, pre-COVID, about 19 percent of world gross domestic product. So we've seen that wealth translate into military power, diplomatic might, Belt and Road Initiative, increasing technology, space exploration, ideological warfare and political warfare employed very effectively against the West and other states in international politics. So here's a group that is telling you they want to kill you, you're the barrier, they're going to supplant you, undermine you, and replace you. And then the leader himself is saying that time and time again, and they have the might, the muscle, to begin to be

able to do that if the United States does not respond. You just reminded me of a recent piece that you published in the Epoch Times talking about TikTok. You say TikTok, in a way, plays the role that these Soviets, the workers groups, did in Tsarist Russia, that they were actually used by the Bolsheviks then to essentially as the sort of centers of thuggery to enact the revolution. So that's fascinating. Tell me about that. Well, sure.

The Chinese Communist Party is a student of communist thought and of communist history, and Soviets play a very important role in communist history. A Soviet was created by the Tsar in the wake of the 1905 revolution, and a Soviet was a workingman's council. We can think of them as a union, where there's an economic role. There's also a role in civil society, and there's a political role. The Tsar welcomed them. He saw them as a sign of progress.

Now the Soviets were getting, in essence, the Russians were getting unions, and that was a sign of becoming increasingly Western, increasingly modern. The Bolsheviks recognized, as well as other communist groups and socialist groups, that those could be, that was a gift. They could be radicalized and turned against the czar's government. And in fact, they were very quickly radicalized and turned against the czar's and played a key role in the October 1917 revolution. So what is a Soviet in this sense? What it is, it's something that you welcome, and you see it as a sign of progress, and even innocuous, like TikTok, right?

It's welcomed. 75 million Americans at least have downloaded it, and it's seen as something which is innocuous. But, of course, it's there to undermine you. It's a tool to be used against you by the CCP. And so what I suggest in the piece that we need to see it as such, right? What you have done is just given the Communist Party of China access to you and the ability to influence

you in elections, the ability to influence you in your political behavior, in your beliefs, and how you see the rest of the world, but also to recognize that we need to do that to the PRC. We need to do that to the Chinese Communist Party. We need to find either a technological, if you will, TikTok in reverse to do that against the CCP, or a social TikTok in reverse, like the Soviets were, something that they would welcome and that would be seen as benign, but that could be used to undermine them.

Well, I mean, they're becoming, in a sense, quite isolationist, right? More and more isolationist. For example, we talk about decoupling, but what I'm observing is the CCP under Xi Jinping is decoupling on its own terms, decoupling the things that are beneficial to it to decouple and not decoupling the things that are not. And I think they're, perhaps because of this paranoia that you just talked about a little earlier, they're not really ready to take on any sort of Soviets as you describe them, right? In fact, they're expecting that because that's exactly what they would do. Indeed. They are artful when it comes to political warfare, but there are avenues into their

society, into their culture. There are avenues that the West provides in terms of technology or finance that do give us the ability, working with the diaspora, working with individuals within Chinese society, or working with groups that rightfully tout the greatness of Chinese civilization in religious thought and philosophy and aesthetics and so many other areas. There are many avenues actually into the society that might be usefully employed to show that the CCP is a Western artifact, it has nothing to do with Chinese history, it is an illegitimate government and should be seen as such.

Well, except that we, and when I say we, I would say the folks that govern this country, we need to actually believe that as opposed to perhaps admire the CCP or China under the CCP for its great efficiency or for its ability to tamp down on potentially problematic elements like those Muslims in Xinjiang. Who knows what they're really doing? Of course, I'm being incredibly glib. The reality is this creates a totalitarian reality where any minority views, doesn't matter how valid, can be snuffed out. But there's a kind of a weird obsession that I'm observing in the world among Western thought with control. So I'm not so convinced that

everything you describe, which speaks to my heart moments ago, is something that even intellectually, a lot of people who are over there, for example, in the American embassy in Beijing, doling out whatever new technologies the U.S. government has developed daily, are thinking. I don't think they're thinking that way. I don't think that they are either. It's a profound problem. We started the discussion with the observation that we don't see them as the enemy, that the U.S. government may say certain things and publish certain documents by the Pentagon or certain commissions that call attention to this, but the U.S. government's not acting that way. They're not, and neither

is U.S. society, treating them as the enemy. So it gets to that fundamental problem. Why are we not seeing them as an enemy? And I think you're very usefully suggesting that it's because they're admired, the CCP is admired by at least a segment of the American elite. Perhaps some of the 400 who were at that dinner admire the CCP for its efficiency, as Bill Gates has said, and for other issues. It doesn't have union problems, I suppose, would be another reason why the 400 look admiringly upon it. So these individuals do not understand communism and they do not understand the nature of the threat.

And in one sense, why should they? Because they've never been challenged to. The government has never challenged them or forced them to act like Americans rather than acting like a CEO who's trying to maximize return to shareholders. And until we see that in fact they need to identify the enemy as such and act accordingly, we're going to have that profound disconnect which hurts us, it hobbles us, it fetters us in a way that we're not able to mobilize and direct ourselves at a time of tremendous vulnerability that the CCP faces. So reading your book, you offer a whole suite of, I think, very thoughtful solutions. A

lot of them, though, to me, they seem like they would require that understanding before. Do you see what I'm saying? Yes. When I read your book, I imagine there's some portion of America, believes fundamentally in American values, believes in the Constitution, believes that America, with all its myriad of problems today, is fundamentally good, and that it's a system that deserves to live on, and it's actually a beacon of hope in the world. It's the shining city on the hill, if I may.

But unfortunately, a lot of our institutions of education, where power is exercised and so forth have been captured by people who think differently. Maybe you're happy to have a so-called managed decline, if you heard that term before. And maybe even wonder if this system, which is the heart of CCP propaganda, as you point out really well, is that no, our system is actually better. We should rule, frankly, the world with our system because it's so great. Absolutely. We can, empirically, we can contrast the number of allies the CCP has versus the number of allies the U.S. has.

The CCP's existence is defined by exploitation of people and the environment. It doesn't have friends in international politics. It buys Pakistan, it buys Cambodia and other states, North Korea and Russia. But the United States has about 84 allies. The United States is an open society. The United States is a society which has been able to transform itself. It went through civil rights revolutions, a women's rights movement. It has remade itself as a society which is far more equitable, far more democratic, and far more in accord with universal political principles which resonate around the world, in contrast to the tyranny of the CCP.

Nobody is trying to get into China. Everybody is trying to get into the United States, by the tens of millions, and it would be hundreds of millions if they could. People are trying to flee communist China. Again, empirically, people vote with their feet, as Birkwald identified. Indeed, they do vote with their feet. And where are they going? The U.S. is a far better ally. It treats its partners and its allies in a far more equitable way than the ruthless, essentially, exploitation of communist China. So let's look at that empirically and let's size it up.

We can see that the United States objectively as well as subjectively, ideologically, and in terms of universal values for men, for women, for the rights of sexual minorities and so many other groups are far better treated in the United States. Also, Western civilization. It is the art of Western civilization. It is the science. It is the approach, the scientific approach, and if you will, of intellectual thought that the United States is a part of also, which has contributed to its greatness and which serves in direct contrast to the

society that the Chinese Communist Party created. It seems, you know, you're sharing this, I'm thinking, my goodness, this is so obvious, right? But isn't this is the power of political warfare, right? It is. And that the great successes of the United States and of the West in general can be denigrated, can be minimized, or they can essentially not be addressed at all. And the warts of the civilization, right? I mean, it's something that what we need to have, I think, in our society is that Cromwellian approach, warts and all. Yes, you can pay attention to the mistakes that we've made, but if you look at the portrait in general, they're insignificant in contrast

to what has been provided to the American people, to the world broadly by the international order that the United States and Great Britain created in the wake of World War II that successfully fought a Cold War and then seemed to have lost its way after the defeat of the Soviet Union and, let us hope, is able to find once again the path to the defeat of the Communist Party of China. They're artful at political warfare, and they're very useful in working with individuals within the United States to try to introduce, if you will, intellectual Alzheimer's or amnesia in the United States and among our elite. And perversely, the American

elite seem to see that the dictatorship of Xi Jinping is something to be emulated. And this positive question of the 21st century is going to be this issue. It's going to be whether tyranny wins. Is China able to make its mark and sustain it on the rest of the world? Or is freedom, as evinced by the American system and American power, going to win the day? And as we've suggested, of course, it's not clear what the answer to that question is. Well, and it's also not clear because the West itself is toying with these ideologies. In your book, you talk a lot about what

Chinese under the Chinese Communist Party world order would look like, because we already can see what that would look like by how they operate. Tell me a little bit about that. Well, we can see it, and it's defined by the self-interest of the Chinese Communist Party. The world order that they're seeking to create, and that they are, while being a part of the Western order, they're also making their own international institutions. And those are institutions' approaches which only favor and heavily favor, of course, the PRC's interest, whether that's exploitation in Pakistan or whether that is the extraction of oil, energy resources from Sudan and essentially elsewhere,

whether that is raw exploitation, buying in essence political influence in the Solomon Islands and in so many other places. People who come to get to know the CCP don't like it. Guy Scott, a Zambian politician, who said in 2006 in an interview to The Guardian, we've had bad people before. The whites are bad, we're bad. The Indians were worse, but the Chinese are worst of all in terms of the raw exploitation of Zambia. And his encounter with the CCP was not a pleasant one. Now, to a degree, they offset that by buying, right? They offset that by buying local elites and rewarding local elites. But people of goodwill, again, around the world can see this and can see that this is not a society which is in any way egalitarian, in any way is equitable.

You could look at the experience of Africans in the PRC and their experiences and to see that it is not, or when essentially Chinese entities traveled in Africa or working in Africa, the experience is almost without exception an unhappy one. The party has a very strong hierarchy, a very clear hierarchy, and people with darker complexion are far lower down that hierarchy than what the party envisions. And again, that does not receive the attention that it should. Likewise, in essentially issues of women's rights. So we could go down, of course, very important issues that affect people around the world, and we can see that the People's Republic of China is

found wanting in all of those categories. One of the things that you highlight repeatedly, and this is somewhat rare, actually, I think, in the literature around China and under the Chinese Communist Party that I've read, is understanding the nature of communism, to understand the China threat. If you miss the nature of communism or somehow don't want to know or somehow assume, oh, they're like us, that's a mistake. So explain that to me. Certainly. The Chinese Communist Party is a threat really for three different levels of analysis or types of explanations. First, Xi Jinping is a threat, right? We can think about police investigating a car crash.

They look at the driver. If the driver is okay, they look at the car. And if the car is okay, they look at the road conditions. Well, looking at the driver, Xi Jinping, we see great danger. Here's an individual who's paranoid and is leading the CCP in a very dangerous direction, which is going to have immediate negative consequences for the rest of the world, Taiwan, Japan, U.S. allies, partners around the world. Driver's a problem. Xi Jinping is a major problem. But secondly, the car. The car is the Chinese Communist Party. It is a Soviet knockoff. It's a danger, a threat to everything on the road. Pedestrians, dogs, cats, other cars to be hindered by the car he's driving. That ideology of communism essentially is the essence of that automobile. It's caused car crashes everywhere

it's been tried. Anybody who's gotten into it has wrecked, whether it was the Soviets or North Korea, who can go around the world. It's always failed. It's a disaster. Then, Jan, there's also the road conditions. And if the road condition is Interstate 80 in Iowa, it's flat, it's straight, and it's quite easy to drive. That's one thing. But if you're dealing with hairpin curves in a sleet, in whiteout conditions,

or in fog, very different road conditions. Part of the problem that we faced is that young people, so many Americans, think that international politics is only driving on Interstate 80 in Iowa. It's only easy. And the car is a great car car and drivers are quite good. They don't understand that in fact road conditions can be dire and will easily change and will cause disasters. So when we're looking at this issue, we can say there's profound trouble that we face and that problem is only going to get worse. So we have major problems not understanding the car. Xi Jinping could die today. He could die tomorrow. But the car is still going to determine a lot of the driver's behavior and make the driver really a very dangerous one.

What is it about communism or communist thought, communist ideology that makes it, as you said, fail catastrophically every time it's attempted? Because it's the negation of humanity. It's the negation of what people see. It's an absolute control over others, which people chafe at that type of system. So it's also dangerous because it seems appealing in terms of the way it was envisioned and in terms of many of its adherents. It seems to lead you to a better world, it also seems to be scientific, which seems to attract a lot of intellectuals. You're on a path, you can study society and you can move society

in a certain direction. And yes, you're going to break eggs, but you're going to get an omelet at the end of the day. Of course, the omelet never shows up, but there are so many tens of millions, hundreds of millions of broken eggs killed individuals in just the tremendous human rights abuses without parallel. So communism is an anti-humanitarian ideology. It suppresses human freedom.

It does not permit human freedom. And because it is tyrannical and negation of the human spirit, of the human condition, it will fail wherever it is tried. It can last longer if it's subsidized. If Wall Street will invest in it, then it will last longer. But if it is cut off, then it will collapse sooner. As you're talking, I've been thinking a lot about the First Amendment. We've been having a lot of discussions in America, again in the West, about the value of free speech and so forth. But thinking about the First Amendment, of course you have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, or freedom of conscience, and

of course freedom of the press. So the CCP, I can't help but thinking, the CCP is antithetical, or communism in general is antithetical to all of these things. It hates them. Not to mention the Second Amendment definitely hates that. It does indeed. It hates any aspect of liberty, any aspect of freedom it seeks to destroy. It seeks absolute control and absolute tyranny over anyone operating within that system. And so despite its intellectual appeal to so many, of course, over decades, many decades, looking at it and empirically examining it, it is the negation of every liberty that America

holds, deals, and the political culture that we have formulated, of course, in the United States. And it is undergoing a unique form of challenges. Communism is not something which exists only in China. It's also present in the U.S. And the U.S. is undergoing a tremendous ideological upheaval presently between political liberalism, traditional ideology of the United States, versus progressivism, which is a form of communist thought.

And so the struggle between the CCP and the United States takes place in an international realm to be sure, but it also has a domestic role to play as well, where individuals who are sympathetic to communism operating within the United States. They're free to have the political beliefs that they want and to express them, but they also recognize, as Lenin observed, that they're useful idiots. They're serving an odious and tyrannical power. That if it wins, if Beijing is able to set the rules, norms, principles, behavior of the 21st century, those individuals, again, will rue the day, of course. That'll be called comfort, but they'll recognize, of course, their folly.

Well, Dr. Thayer, this has been a fascinating discussion for me. Any final thoughts as we finish? Well, a final thought is that we're going to win. Despite the problems that we have, there's enough, if you will, strength in American society, the values that we possess, and the ideology that we hold. Jan, as we stress in the book, it is an ideological struggle. And our ideology is infinitely better, far superior to the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party. And that serves to explain why we fight and why we should fight and why we will win. So we need to have that confidence to recognize that if we

steel ourselves, if we recognize the nature of the threat and its tremendous vulnerabilities and exploit those vulnerabilities, we can defeat them just as we did the Soviet Union. Well, Dr. Bradley Thayer, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. It was my pleasure. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you all for joining Dr. Bradley Thayer and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. Terima kasih. you you you you