American Thought Leaders - The Real Battleground With China Is Ideological—And America Needs to Counterattack, Says John Lenczowski

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

John Lenczowski is the founder, chancellor, and president emeritus of The Institute of World Politics, a District of Columbia-based graduate school that specializes in the instruments of statecraft and national security. He was the principal Soviet affairs advisor to President Ronald Reagan.What are the Chinese Communist Party’s primary tools of strategic deception? And why don’t more people know about them?“The Chinese have 600 front organizations operating in the United States today trying to influence all sorts of segments of our society,” he says.In this episode, we sit down to discuss America’s failure to understand the nature of the communist China threat, and what should be done to counter it.“The problem is that our foreign policy establishment is principally concerned with creating what I consider to be the false atmospherics of peace, rather than genuine peace,” he says.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 Chinese have 600 front organizations operating in the United States today, trying to influence all sorts of segments of our society. Dr. John Lenczewski is the founder, chancellor, and president emeritus of the Institute of World Politics and was the principal Soviet affairs advisor to President Ronald Reagan. The problem is that our foreign policy establishment is principally concerned with creating what I consider to be the false atmospherics of peace rather than genuine peace. We sit down to discuss America's failure to recognize

the full extent of the threat of communist China and what should be done to counter it. The Chinese Communist Party is effectively like an organized criminal enterprise. The Chinese regime has killed somewhere between 60 million and 200 million of its own people. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. John Lenczewski, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. I'm Jan Jekielek. John Lenczewski, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. It is my pleasure and honor to be here, Jan. Thank you. So, John, I read your article from earlier this year, Cold War Strategy for Genuine Peace with

China. In there, you have an astonishing list of various offensive actions that the Chinese regime has taken against America, against the West. And I didn't even know about some of these things, like, for example, Stinger missiles, an attempt to deliver Stinger missiles to gangs in LA. How is it that we don't know about these things? Well, there are many reasons, and particularly, it is the failure of our national leadership to tell the American people the truth about these acts of aggression against us. There is willful blindness, there is wishful thinking, there is mirror imaging, there is corruption, there are all sorts of business interests who would prefer to try to do harmonious business with the Chinese communist regime just the way there were businesses that wanted to make money by doing business with Russia and with Nazi Germany before that, before the Cold War, and I should say the Soviet Union. In any event, there has been self-censorship

about these matters. The academic community and the media community have been corrupted, effectively, by the Chinese communist regime. Academics have learned to respect what I call the four taboos. Don't, and journalists too, don't write about Chinese human rights violations, don't write about their military buildup, don't write about their espionage, and don't write about their covert political influence operations, many of which also are overt. And so if you don't write about those things, then you'll get a visa to China, and you can go to the country of your expertise, and your New York Times bureau won't be shut down, and you won't be expelled for writing things that are offensive to the Chinese communist regime. So there are many, many reasons for this.

Although, John, if I can jump in, I mean, all those things that you just described, they are covered somewhat today. I mean, human rights violations to a better extent. But for years, the New York Times and the Washington Post, most notably, were taking millions of dollars from the Chinese propaganda ministry to publish Chinese communist propaganda in the periodic China Watch supplement. And during that whole time, I don't know how much that supplement was influencing people.

It was designed to give people the impression that China is a dynamic, culturally rich, innovative country that's basically a normal society that is a natural competitor to the United States. But it is designed basically to obscure the aggressive intent of the Chinese Communist regime and the acts of aggression that they have actually taken against us. And meanwhile, while they're accepting, while these newspapers are accepting all of this money from Beijing, they are not reporting about the matters in the four taboos. A little bit on human rights, a little bit on human rights, because when both Republican and Democratic administrations declare that the communist regime is committing genocide against

the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province, East Turkestan, somebody has to write a little something about this. But almost nothing is being written about forced organ transplants, about forced abortions, about the persecution of various different religious groups. And you would see nothing in the Washington Post and the New York Times about military and espionage activities that are inimical to the national security of the United States. The television networks follow their lead in terms of what is politically acceptable to report. And now after some of this, after this corruption, the accepting of the Chinese money to publish the Chinese communist propaganda was exposed. I don't think that they're publishing.

I don't see now the China Watch supplement anymore. But those weren't the only papers. The Des Moines Register was publishing this kind of stuff, just as an example. And then look at the think tanks. Something like a half a dozen, maybe it's seven or eight blue chip think tanks were accepting money from front organizations of Chinese intelligence and doing joint projects with them. We're talking about the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Carter Center, my own alma mater, which is Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. This is scandalous, absolutely scandalous. And some of these think tanks,

like the Carnegie Endowment, were actually hiring Chinese intelligence operatives to work on their staff. This is interest. The academic institutions are addicted to Chinese students who pay full tuition. Many of these students are going into the STEM departments. Many of them already have the advanced degrees in engineering, for example, that they are seeking in the American institutions. Why would they come and get a duplicate degree? Well, because they learned the basics in China, and now they know what the cutting-edge research

could be that their professors are engaging in, all the easier to steal it and to report it to the Chinese MSS, their intelligence service. So there's so many reasons why the American people don't know about it. But the biggest problem is that our national leadership that is privy to at least to a lot of the intelligence about this, is not reporting these facts to the American people. In contrast, take a look at Ronald Reagan and his administration. He was warning us about the Soviet military buildup throughout the 1970s. He was questioning the policy of detente, which is the equivalent of today's policy of engagement with the Chinese Communist regime. In November 1982, Reagan gave a nationwide televised speech on the Soviet military threat

and how Soviet armaments were growing and growing and growing while ours were declining. And he helped build a pro-defense consensus in this country that ended up having extremely salutary effects. Well, of course, you'd be very familiar with this whole thing because you worked on his National Security Council back in the day before founding the Institute of World Politics. You're describing, I guess you could say, the overall state of affairs over the last 20, 30, 40 years. Things have changed significantly, at least in my eye, in the last eight, five, seven, eight years, something like that. Would you agree?

Well, I think that what has changed is that Xi Jinping has decided to take the off in many respects. The grand strategist behind China's rise as a strategic peer and competitor of the United States was Deng Xiaoping, who said, hide your capabilities and bide, we should hide our capabilities and bide our time. He was a master of the central strategic deception exercised by the Chinese regime, which is the same thing as the central strategic deception theme of the Soviet Union. And that is, we are not communist anymore. We've changed. And we're just a bunch of nice people and we give you ping pong games and we give you pandas and you can hug our pandas and do harmonious business with us and make a lot of money and everybody will be happy. And during this whole time, China has been building itself up, has been stealing our technology. and their students and their business, their friendly business delegations and everything else is the greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of the world. And it is at our expense. It is at the expense of our ability to be competitive economically in the world, and it is at the expense of our competitive edge in military

and intelligence technology. We became convinced that the Chinese communist regime is not communist anymore. And of course, if they had actually changed, as the strategic deception theme tells us, that means that by definition they no longer have unlimited objectives on the global stage. Accepting this strategic deception theme is the same intellectual error as those in the 1930s who assumed that Hitler's desire for Lebensraum, more room for the German people, was effectively no different than the Kaiser's imperial ambitions, which were limited. The Kaiser simply wanted Germany to have its place in the sun, as they said, alongside the other great imperial powers of Europe. Why shouldn't Germany have an empire too? So if Hitler is no different than the Kaiser, then perhaps, and if he has indeed limited objectives, well,

perhaps those limited objectives can be accommodated, perhaps even appeased. When in fact, if you are dealing with a voracious power, with a revolutionary, ideologically based ambition of unlimited objectives, then appeasement will only whet the appetite. Well, I'm going to get you to, first of all, just explain to me, I mean, it might seem obvious, but what exactly unlimited objectives means and how can you know? This would seem to be a foundational question. Well, it is in the nature of the ideology. Marxism-Leninism has a vision of the inevitable victory of communism worldwide on the basis of the proletarian class struggle against

the oppressor class. Now, Communist China has a variant of this. They claim that their main ideology, and they reiterate this all the time, they just did it this summer at the plenum of the Communist Party, that their ideology is Marxism-Leninism with Chinese characteristics. They're emphasizing the importance of Mao Zedong thought and the importance of Xi Jinping thought. And so in the case of the Chinese, and I do not think that the regime represents the people, I consider it to be the oppressor of the people, but the attempts to harness Chinese nationalism as a part of its global strategy. The Soviets tried to do this too, from time to time. When they were threatened by Hitler, and they had to embark on the Great Fatherland War,

Великая Отечественная Война. And it wasn't the Great Class War, the Great Proletarian War, the Great Communist War. It was the Great Fatherland War. They had revised Russian history. They had thrown historic Russian heroes into the dustbin to destroy the national memory and to remake the national identity. But now they had to mobilize every force they possibly could in order to fight the Nazis. And so they rehabilitated those heroes, Alexander Nevsky and the others. And they took the Russian Orthodox priests out of the gulag and said, you can go

back to your churches because of the close relationship between Russian Orthodox Christianity and the Russian national identity. These people were all languishing in the slave labor camps if they were still alive. But now they're mobilized in a great nationalistic war effort. And of course, so many people in the foreign policy establishment, if you ask them what are Soviet objectives in the world and, you know, what is the foundation of Soviet foreign policy? Well, they say it's a combination of Marxism-Leninism and Russian national interest, Russian nationalism. Well, excuse me, there may be such a combination, but which is the senior partner? In my book, the short answer to this is that it is a communist party operation that is attempting to harness the Russian national horse in its battle plan.

And the Chinese communist regime is doing the exact same thing. They're trying to harness Chinese national pride, the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, the restoration of the Middle Kingdom. But ultimately, they want to control and dominate the world, if possible make all the rest of the world tributary states. Marxism-Leninism defines a new form of international relations. It's called proletarian internationalism. You don't hear the Chinese communist regime using this expression very much because it was a Soviet expression. And they called it explicitly a new form of international relations. Well, what does that mean? Well, it means that international relations are now not going to be conducted on a nation-to-nation basis,

because the nation actually is a dangerous thing. The nation-state government is actually part of the system of oppression within a given country. And so that's why the state has to wither away and will wither away, according to the communist prophecies. And so then how are relations conducted on a global basis amongst peoples? Well, they're conducted on a party-to-party basis, because the party is the genuine representative of the people, you see. And so how does China conduct its relations with North Korea, for example? Not through the foreign ministry, not through the instruments of the state. They conduct it on a party-to-party basis.

So even though they don't use this expression, the Chinese Communist regime is de facto pursuing a policy of proletarian internationalism. And you can extrapolate that to the rest of the world as part of Chinese ambitions. First, they'll have a system of tributary states. Then those state systems are basically designed to evaporate. And things will be conducted on a party-to-party basis, which is the only way the Chinese regime can fully feel secure when it doesn't have normal nation states with self-determination, with consent of the governed, with alternative forms of

legitimization of state authority. What is the legitimizing instrument of state authority in China? It's Marxism-Leninism with Chinese characteristics. Many people, including some very prominent sinologists who even I have a deep respect for their work, will tell us, hey, most people in China don't believe in communism anymore. It's something different. Including party members. Correct. Well, no, exactly. Well, this is the terrible failure of mirror imaging. Mirror imaging is the treacherous methodology of looking at other cultures as if they are just like us. And so the assumption here by all sorts of people observing China, including prominent and

otherwise very sound thinking sinologists, is that you have to believe in an ideology for it to be politically operational. But this is not the case. This was not the case in the Soviet Union, and it is not the case in China. And one has to study enough about ideology, not only to know what its guiding principles are or constraining principles, if you want to put it from another perspective. But you have to understand what its functions are in the system. And in China, as it was in other communist countries, as it is in North Korea, the ideology serves two fundamental purposes. One is to legitimize the regime in power. Why does the party deserve to be in power? Well, it's the Marxist-Leninist ideology that supplies that for them.

And I can explain that if you like, but that's their principal instrument. They have auxiliary instruments. They like to say, well, we are Chinese patriots who are building up the Chinese nation. They can say, you know, we are presiding over a growing economy and have brought millions of poor people. But that's entirely tangential. We're giving justice for the century of humiliation, for example. Right, yes. And nobody else could have done it. We were the ones who did it. You know, the Soviets had a similar thing. You know, we may be bastards, but we're your bastards.

We were the only ones who could get rid of and fend off the Nazis. So the Chinese have a variant of all of this themselves. But so legitimization, you know, or legitimation is the one essential function. But the other essential function is internal security. The Chinese regime is an illegitimate regime. It rules without the consent of the governed. And so it has an internal security problem. It is afraid of their own, they're afraid of their own people. The central fact of political life in China is the regime's fear of its own people. And so when you are afraid of the people, you set up this massive internal security system, informants everywhere. So that's one. Then you've got the Lao guy, the Chinese Gulag archipelago, and nobody knows what it is because the media will never report about the Lao guy. And then you've got control over capital, control, large control over the economy. You've

got control over and the penetration of every different organized body within the country. You have control over education, over entertainment, the jamming of foreign radio broadcasts. There are so many different aspects of totalitarian control in China. And so where does the ideology fit in all of this? The ideology is the central element of totalitarianism in so many respects because it establishes the standard of conformity. Conformity of semantics, of speech, of thought, thought control, and ultimately behavior control. It sets the standard against which deviationism is measured. It is the equivalent of the drum beating for soldiers marching. Why do armies make soldiers march? To deprive them of their individuality and to stress obedience, because you cannot do proper military operations unless everybody obeys the order.

If you do not march according to the drumbeat, the sergeant can identify you as a nonconformist, as a voluntarist, as a dissident, as a slacker, whatever, but that violates the principle of political conformity and in the case of the Communist Party itself, party discipline. And that person can be then gone on, can be sent off for remediation, for punishment or whatever. You have to have a party line. And everybody has to repeat the lies. And the lie changes according to the exigencies of the party at any given time. So for example, in the Soviet Union, I didn't go to do my doctoral research in the Soviet Union because you could not get a back issue of Pravda in

Soviet libraries because they didn't want their own people reading what they themselves published six months ago. I could get everything in the Library of Congress, but not in the Soviet Union. And in China, the same issue basically pertains. The party line changes and people have to be disciplined. And so you maintain party discipline through setting forth this party line, and then you maintain ideological and behavioral conformity amongst the people. And, you know, basically, John, what you're telling me is that belief in the ideology is completely irrelevant. Yes, that's exactly right. You don't have to believe in it to be politically operational, for it to be politically operational within the system.

You know, Marxism-Leninism is a theory of knowledge, it's a theory of history, a theory of society, of economy, and so on. But it is also a theory of how to use and maintain, how to seize and maintain power. And so as an ideology of power, you know, here's where Lenin made at least one major innovation. He created the idea, a couple of innovations. One was he created the idea of the professional revolutionary. And then he created the idea of maintaining conformity to the ideological party line. Because if you had conformity to the party line, then everybody would march together in the realm of action. And if there was dissent from the party line, then there could be, you know, there would be insufficient discipline in the realm of action. And they wouldn't

be able to seize power in the first place, and they wouldn't be able to exercise power. And so party discipline is a huge issue in communist countries, and it is particularly in China. Xi Jinping has been engaged in massive purges of various officials, including very senior ones in the Party, on the basis of corruption. Well, there are two ways of interpreting corruption. One is that it is simply a cover for not being sufficiently loyal and subservient to Xi Jinping's and the and the party collective's rule. But it also can mean a lack of party

discipline. In the old Soviet Union it was called partinost, which means party-mindedness. And one of the big problems in the old Soviet Union was that the party started getting genuinely corrupt. It was being bribed by the people in the underground economy. And then the party members started investing in the underground economy and developing forms of self-interest that were at variance with the party's interest. And so Gorbachev and before him Andropov were engaged in huge purges and prosecutions of party members in order to restore party discipline. Well, the Chinese learned, Chinese communists learned something from this, and they have tried to make it possible for people to get rich while still being party members. The problem is that too much self-interest can skew an official's

and a party member's priorities. And of course, that self-interest means the person is being a human being and no longer a disciplined ideological robot. The party wants disciplined ideological robots. And so when they start diverging, when they start exercising a little humanity, a little individualism, that's when they become a threat to the overall cohesion and power of the party. The ideology is the way of enforcing all of this. You mentioned earlier that you like to distinguish between the Chinese people and the regime itself. And I am a huge fan of this idea for decades, when it just became obvious, I guess. This was first, I mean, at a government level, verbalized by Secretary of State Pompeo, if I recall, in an official capacity.

I thought that was remarkable, because I'd never heard such a thing from my Canadian government or the U.S. government before. Why is that so important? Well, ultimately, we in the United States and the West, so to speak, and people who in the East who have much of the spirit of the West, who care about liberty and so on and so forth, have been in a 100-year-long battle against totalitarianism. The problem is that the war against totalitarianism isn't just between major powers, it's also within each of our societies. And so the war against totalitarianism is going on within China between the communist regime and segments of the Chinese people. And there are so many people in China, of course, who don't

actually fight the war because they have come to accept their fate, which is what the party wants them to do. The party wants them in a state of helplessness, hopelessness, despair, mollified a little bit by some material improvements in life insofar as people get to middle class status. But basically the party wants them in the psychological state of futile resignation. Where resistance to party rule, resistance to capricious and arbitrary justice as administered by party apparatchiks is simply accepted by the people. And people have to lump it. And so that's the way, that is the way life is in China. And people, millions, hundreds of millions of people accept their fate and believe that resistance is futile. But there are those who still have a spirit of wanting to try to achieve genuine freedom. And so what is so strategic about

making this distinction between the regime and the people is that the people are and ought to be the de facto allies of those of us in the West who genuinely believe in freedom and inalienable human rights and of the kind that are conceived by our founders, of the kind that were articulated by Martin Luther King. I can think back to the Reagan years, and there was a policy of engaging, but there doesn't seem has been overtly articulated by the Biden administration and Secretary Blinken that the Chinese communist regime is effectively a permanent feature of the global geostrategic landscape, and that it will never change, and that it cannot change, and that we should not try to change it, and that our should not try to change it and that our objective is not to change it.

On the basis of this premise, that means that we have to learn to get along with it if we don't want to have a nuclear war. And so we have to try to create some semblance of peace with them. The problem is that our foreign policy establishment is principally concerned with creating what I consider to be the false atmospherics of peace rather than genuine peace. And that means, you know, in the case of the Soviet Union, when it was detente, let's have arms control agreements. They would love to have arms control agreements with China, too. And there would be a treaty signing ceremony and champagne, you know, bottles would be popped open and there would be handshakes and maybe even a few hugs and kisses of the detente variety from the 1970s.

There's nothing like having agreements that give the impression that peace has arrived. And all sorts of agreements can be reached, exchange agreements and so on and so forth, that look like we're having harmonious relations. But it's basically a facade because the Chinese communists are very happy to create the deceptive atmospherics of peace because it will give them cover for their military build-up, for their espionage activities, for their influence operations. The Chinese have 600 front organizations operating in the United States today trying to influence all sorts of segments of our society. And they have their Confucius

Institutes, they have all these other things. There is this assumption, therefore, that the regime, in fact, is representative of the people when it's not. And nobody wants to tell the truth about this with the exception of, you know, Secretary Pompeo. And it happens Vice President Pence made a pathbreaking speech at the Hudson Institute about this. We need to be thinking in terms of how to connect with our allies in China. And the foreign policy establishment is not thinking that way. Well, I was gonna mention that this approach, right, is not kind of unique to the Biden administration.

It's kind of been the de facto approach with perhaps this one rare exception that you just described. I mean, at least to my eye. I also think that the atmospherics of peace might be, people may believe that that actually will achieve peace. It's all false. The atmospherics of peace do not harm the Chinese communist regime because they know what they're doing. But it does harm the United States because it has the effect of psychological and intellectual disarmament. And, you know, one of the key elements of Chinese strategy and of communist Chinese strategic deception is to psychologically disarm the United States.

Because once we are convinced that China is not a threat, then there is no need for a navy. There's no need to maintain defenses against Chinese space weaponry and worry about Chinese hypersonic missiles and develop defenses against them. And of course, because there is absolutely no sense of urgency about these matters, because the Chinese navy is now bigger than us, than our navy. And of course, there's the old aphorism that God is usually on the side of the larger squadrons compared to the smaller squadrons. The bureaucratic stasis when it comes to military acquisitions continues apace. There is no building of a defense consensus or increasing vigilance

in the American public about the presence of Chinese intelligence collectors in this country. There are something like 25,000 communist Chinese intelligence collectors. And this comes straight from as authoritative a U.S. counterintelligence official as there can be. But although the FBI director has made some testimony about Chinese espionage and so on and so forth, he has not fully described the level of gravity of the Chinese espionage threat. We were discussing earlier about this idea of going on the offense against China. I was saying that just even thinking about that somehow brings this discomfort, but really it's an issue of reciprocity. If there's aggression only in one direction,

that doesn't work very well. That's right. The Biden administration has repeatedly said that it doesn't want to move relations with China into the realm of Cold War. Well, excuse me, Mr. President and Madam Vice President, the Chinese are conducting Cold War against us and have been doing so for a very long time. Well, excuse me, I think that we need to have some defense against this. And by the way, an offensive strategy, a strategy of reciprocity, does not mean going to to war as people conventionally understand it. It means conducting some of the non-kinetic instruments of political influence and even of conflict that are totally neglected by the U.S. foreign policy establishment. So, for example, in a war, as Clausewitz teaches, you go after the adversary's center of gravity.

Well, what's the center of gravity in China? In my analysis, it is the internal security system of the Chinese Communist Party. And the nucleus of that internal security system is the ideological party line combined with their monopoly of communications and information. And so one of the key elements of totalitarian rule is to atomize society, to separate every individual from everybody else by creating an atmosphere of fear and mistrust, first of all. You live in fear and mistrust because you don't know who is an informant. And you can't speak frankly to just about anybody because you might be turned in to the secret police. You know, the monopoly of communications and information means that people cannot organize themselves into cells of resistance to the regime.

That's the strategic importance of atomization. And so one way of combating this atomization and to give hope to the people, move them from despair to hope, from futile resignation to the possibility that resistance is not futile, is to communicate with them. First of all, to let them know that they're not all alone. When we censor ourselves about the nature of the Chinese regime. It's totalitarian, oppressive, evil methods by which they exercise power against their own people and against

minority groups, whether it's the Muslims, the Muslim Hui, the Uyghurs, the Mongolians, the Tibetans, and there are other smaller groups, religious groups, whether it is Buddhist Christians, Muslims, Falun Gong. But we need to break down that monopoly of communications and information by broadcasting, short wave, medium wave, digital radio, mondial, that's DRM, it's the digital revolution applied to international broadcasting. We need to have a Manhattan project-like enterprise to help break down the Great Firewall. We need to be exploring satellite communications. Every method – I mean in North Korea, the North Korean dissidents and defectors who

get out of there, what is practically the first thing they do? They want to go and work in broadcasting to the North. They will send balloons with leaflets over the demilitarized zone into North Korea. They will put messages and leaflets and USB sticks in bottles with rice and put a cork on the bottle and throw it into the ocean and the tides bring it to the North Korean coast. And people who are hungry both for rice and for the truth will find these bottles. I mean, every method of communication needs to be brought to bear. And we have to be creative about these things. You cannot be secure in your surfing of the internet

in China. The broadcasts help this in a huge way. During the Cold War, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian author, called the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty the most powerful weapons we possessed in the Cold War. How can these radios be the most powerful weapon? They gave people the truth. People were thirsting for the truth almost more than they were hungry for food. They gave people their history back. We gave people alternative ideas, democratic ideas. Imagine inalienable human rights, respect for the dignity of the individual human person, rule of law, separation of powers, checks and balances, astonishing ideas of the founders of this country. But we have to be confident in those ideas. And

people no longer study civics. People have never read the Federalist Papers. They have no concept of the arguments for why our Constitution was written as it was written. It is an astonishing thing to do, to read the Federalist Papers seriously, not to mention having some familiarity with what the Anti-Federalists had to say, who gave us the Bill of Rights. So one day a guy got on a bus in Warsaw in the mid-1950s and started a commuter bus in the morning and he started whistling a song that he heard over Radio Free Europe, a song that you could not hear on the local communist stations. And a very short while later, 15 seconds later, somebody else started whistling it with him, and then somebody else, and then somebody else, and pretty soon the whole bus was whistling this

song. And they all looked at whole bus was whistling this song, and they all looked at each other. They were all silent commuters who didn't communicate. They were all atomized, all atomized individuals. And they looked at each other, and they said, we are all secret listeners to a subversive radio station, and we listen at the pain of punishment. And maybe they could start having conversations of trust amongst themselves. And of course, it was the common faith in Roman Catholicism in Poland that helped bring millions of people together in resistance to the communist regime, which is why helping to support religious groups in China of all kinds is absolutely essential. This would be simply one of the central elements of reciprocity. But, you know, we are so unaccustomed in our diplomatic establishment to being reciprocal about these

things. We gave the Beijing communists, at one point, I testified before Congress about this, over 180 visas to their government correspondence for their media. And Beijing gave us two visas for government correspondence for our media, two for the Voice of America, but they wouldn't give us a third one for a VOA correspondent in Shanghai. And did we protest this lack of reciprocity? No. During the Cold War, there were more KGB agents working in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow than there were Americans. There were zero Americans working in the Soviet Embassy in Washington. How could we let there be more KGB agents working in our embassy in Moscow? And when the State Department was asked about this,

they said, well, it's really hard for us to find housing for Americans in Moscow. The President's Intelligence, Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board asked them, well, is it easy for the Soviets to get housing here in Washington? And they said, yes. Why is it easy for them to get housing if we can't get it there? So the answer, right, I think probably is, well, we're better than that. In other words, we're more mature than they are. And so therefore, we don't need to worry about deception. We don't need to worry about aggressive actions. We don't need to worry about narcotics warfare being conducted against us, I guess. We're just so mature. We can let Americans die of fentanyl overdoses every year from the fentanyl that the Beijing regime knows that is being put together in China and sent over here. First, it was sent over directly, a lot of it through the U.S. mail.

Now they send it through the cartels in Mexico. And our administration keeps the border open so that the fentanyl can come in and kill tens of tens of thousands of more Americans all the time. I'm not talking about sending fentanyl back to China. I'm talking about communicating with the Chinese people. Let's erect some defenses against all of this. There are many defensive actions that may be taken. We need more. We need more and better counterintelligence. We need to restrict the entry of Chinese intelligence collectors into the United States. We need to have greater technology security policy. We need to stop being dependent upon Chinese supply chains of rare earth metals, of our pharmaceuticals,

and of all sorts of other things. It is ridiculous that we should be having Chinese semiconductors built into American military systems. It is ridiculous that we should should permit putative Chinese immigrants to not only to work in some of our most sensitive defense corporations, and then let them go back and visit their family in China every year. Even if you're not actively, let's say you're Chinese and you're not actively recruited as an agent, de facto, you're highly incentivized to share whatever, something that might even be intelligence. Or if you happen to have been in a very sensitive place, it's highly likely that you're going to be asked to share that. And the communist Chinese national security law requires everybody to share that information with the Chinese intelligence services when asked. It's built into the Chinese communist party's law. If you're an engineering student somewhere, you may not be a trained Chinese intelligence case officer,

but if they want to know what Professor X is researching at MIT, you've got to report that. And of course MIT will let all these people in there and gain access to cutting-edge technology. We were letting, and I don't know what the situation is right now, but for years we were permitting Beijing-directed scientists to make 5,000 visits a year to our national laboratories, where a visit constitutes a stay of two weeks to two years. That's one visit, okay? Two weeks to two years. And our naive scientists in the national laboratories, who have not been alerted to the threat of technology transfer

and its application to military systems that are designed to kill Americans are very happy to share their information and their research with other people who are interested in it. And there are all sorts of businesses that do the same thing. I gave a lecture in front of a group of senior business executives and told them if you have a factory and you manufacture something and you have some, you know, something unique about what you do, please don't permit a group of friendly, smiling, jovial Chinese businessmen tourists to come into your factory floor and see what you do. Because what they will do is they will start taking notes of which machine is placed where and how it's connected to that machine and how it's connected to another machine and how it all goes to the distribution center. And they'll bring it back to China and they will replicate the whole thing

and they will put you out of business in three years. Well, one of the executives who heard me say this said, you know, I run a winery in California. And I have some really cutting-edge technology. And next week, I'm receiving a delegation of friendly Chinese businessmen who are interested in my winery. And I was going to show them everything. And now that I hear some reality from you about what they're going to do, I'm just going to ply them with wine. You know, I guess the logical conclusion might seem to be some kind of isolationism. We have to isolate ourselves. No, not whatsoever. I believe in free trade, that prices are established by agreement between consenting adults. But when another country like China subsidizes its industries, makes it so that its champion corporations can never fail, allocates capital

according to its political and strategic priorities, and conducts de facto economic warfare against us and puts our companies out of business. They put our only rare earth metals mining company out of business in California by dumping their rare earth metals on the international marketplace. And now they're restricting them. And now they're restricting them. Now they're restricting them. And we need to protect national security-oriented businesses from this kind of threat. And we simply cannot say the way some globalist free traders say that the American consumer is being subsidized by the Chinese low prices, and we should happily accept their subsidies. Excuse me, no.

This is not free market. This is not a free market capitalist transaction. When the Chinese regime enters the marketplace by subsidizing its industries and restricting our entry into their marketplace, by the way, which is what they do, this is not the free market. It's not genuine free trade. And it is not only an illusion, but it is a deception to call it free trade. You know, it's interesting. Your solution for, let's say, non-national security-oriented businesses like the winery is just simply letting people know what's likely to happen if you choose to cooperate. It's telling people the truth.

And our national leadership, with the exception of the last administration, has not told the truth. And this is for decades, ever since the end of the Cold War. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have told the truth about the rising China threat, Chinese communist threat, because they don't want to conflate the regime with the nation. We need to be conducting ideological combat against the Chinese communist regime. They are conducting ideological combat against us. They support radical leftist groups. They support the balkanization of our country. They are trying to divide our country, deceive our country, steal from our country, and so on. The Soviet Communist regime collapsed. The Chinese Communist Party can collapse too. And there's no reason why we have to build an entire foreign policy around the rejection

of that proposition. The Chinese regime has killed somewhere between 60 million and 200 million of its own people. This is an ideology that has enforced a moral relativism upon the Chinese people, which is at odds with the Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist, and even insofar as they've been there for quite a while, Christian, Muslim, and other Chinese folk religions. And the moral relativism of Marxism-Leninism is completely at odds with Christian and Muslim concepts of divine law and the way of heaven concepts of the Eastern religions. The U.S. government is totally incapable and intellectually and bureaucratically incapable of conducting ideological competition. And part of it is the result of the fact

that huge parts of the American elite no longer believe in the fundamental ideas that are the basis of America and Western civilization. And have bought into the same kind of relativism that is at the foundation of Marxism-Leninism. So that's a problem. That is a problem. What about political warfare? Well, you know, we need to anathematize the Chinese communist regime. There has never been a Nuremberg trial for communism. And maybe that's because there are so many people in this country who became sympathetic with communism. Anti-anti-communism, I repeat, anti-anti-communism has been a very

prevalent sort of tendency within large portions of the American intelligentsia and the American foreign policy establishment. And where anti-communists were considered to be more dangerous than the communists themselves. But the anti-communists did not massacre somewhere around 40 million people plus in the Soviet Union, and 60, 80, 100 million people plus in China. Two million Cambodians. There are people still in China who have blood on their hands from the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. And there needs to be accountability.

The idea of a Nuremberg trial for communism is not mine. It is the idea of Vladimir Bukovsky, who was the first Soviet dissident received in the Oval Office by an American president, by President Carter in the 1970s. A jewel, a diamond of a man who spent a third of his life in the Gulag Archipelago and at the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry where he was. They tried to give him lobotomizing drugs to deprive him of his will to resist. But he came out and he fought the communists. And he recognized that the anathematization of communism is something that has to be done. Every once in a while, there are people within the Communist Party who defect first in their

hearts and then actually defect from the Party. Boris Yeltsin was one of those inside the old Soviet Union. He was a Politburo member who broke with the Party. He was more responsible, in my opinion, than Gorbachev for the ultimate breakdown of the Soviet Communist Party. But we need to be trying to identify and support those who want to defect from the party. The Tweedong Movement. Why do we not pay attention to the Tweedong Movement? For those who are unaware, this is a movement of Chinese who say, we refuse to be part of the party. The party would not exist unless people

made the decision to join it. And so many people join it for reasons of opportunism, kind of cynicism, for power, for business opportunity, and so on. And then there are those. And untold numbers, we don't know because they have to keep it secret. But in their hearts they have said, I will not cooperate with this monstrous, diabolical, oppressive, murderous, and aggressive organization. The Chinese Communist Party is effectively like an organized criminal enterprise, is what it is. We need to start having a vocabulary that employs more truth in semantics. You know, when Ronald Reagan told the truth, he stopped many years of self-censorship by American presidents about the nature of the Soviet system. And he,

and when he told the truth, when he called them an evil empire, those words reverberated into the dankest corridors of the Gulag archipelago. And people like Anatoly Sharansky, now Natan Sharansky, and others heard those words and they said all of a sudden there's hope. There's a little boy in the court who refuses to repeat the big lie. When we censor ourselves, when our leaders censor themselves about the nature of a regime like the Chinese regime, the people and those who have some spirit of resistance left in them become very demoralized. And they say, well the regime is so powerful that it has compelled the President of the United States to say that the naked emperor is wearing beautiful clothes. If he, who is ostensibly free to tell the truth, cannot tell the truth, then what hope is there for us? What hope? Well, we've got to change that psychology.

Ronald Reagan did this. I'm just saying let's do what Ronald Reagan did, to fight the Cold War without firing a shot. And a reflection of that is the fact that there are an average of 180,000 civil disturbances in China every year. And they are usually demonstrations protesting local Communist Party corruption and arbitrary and capricious justice. Well, do those demonstrators know about the existence of the other demonstrators? No, because they're atomized.

They're atomized. When the dissident playwright, who became the first post-communist president of Czechoslovakia, came for a state visit to the United States, did he go to the State Department and thank them for all those summit meetings and arms control agreements? No. He went to the Voice of America and he thanked them for keeping his nation's flame alive for half a century. When Lech Walesa, the head of the Solidarity Movement in Poland, the first president, non-communist president of post-communist Poland, came to the United States, he was asked, how important were Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America to the rise and the sustenance

of the Solidarity Movement, which, for those of you who don't know, was the workers' union, an independent trade union demanding radical political change in Poland. How important were those radios? And Valencia replied, would there be life on earth without the sun? But the foreign policy establishment does not understand this. So there are things we can do. Well, John Lenczewski, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. It's been a pleasure being here. I don't often get the chance to talk about all of these things. So thank you. Thank you all for joining Dr. John Lenczewski and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.