School of War - China’s War on Faith and Trump’s Trip to Beijing, with Governor Sam Brownback

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

Sam Brownback, former Kansas senator and governor, co-chair of the International Religious Freedom Summit, and author of China’s War on Faith, joins School of War to discuss the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of religious minorities and how its domestic oppression shapes America’s broader strategic posture toward China. How is Beijing using the digital revolution as a tool of political control? Should freedom of religion be treated as a central front in the U.S.-China rivalry? With President Trump currently in China for a summit with President Xi Jinping, the world is watching a clash that extends beyond economics and military power into a conflict over faith, freedom, and the moral future of humanity. Times: 03:25 - Trump’s China summit 05:25 - Clash of civilizations 06:18 - History of Christianity in China 08:41 - Governor’s transformative past 11:07- Systems of communism 15:53 - Chinese surveillance technology 17:22 - Peter Xu history 19:40 - Dangers of the CCP 20:53 - Treatment of religious minorities 26:12 - Technologies for oppression 29:00 - Trump’s handling of disentanglement 32:25 - American religious freedom 35:20 - The Falun Gong 37:46 - Confrontation vs. accommodation  42:59 - Story of Wang Chun Yan Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more at The Free Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 2026 Chevrolet Tracks is the stylish SUV for those on the move. And with the standard Chevy safety assist package, you have the backup to handle every turn with confidence. The 26 tracks, start your build at Chevrolet.ca. In recent months on School of War, we've talked a lot about the effects of the digital revolution on war fighting, how big data and AI are changing the nature of what happens on the battlefield. We haven't talked a lot about what this same technology means for domestic political control, in particular in a place like China, where the Chinese Communist Party has a total view of what human nature is and what life in China ought to be. These same digital tools that allow for incredibly impressive targeting on the battlefield,

either an extremely potent tool that we can wield or an extremely dangerous threat that can be wielded by our air. enemies, those same tools can be brought to bear in incredibly effective campaigns of domestic oppression that would be the envy of dictators past like Stalin or Hitler or indeed, relevantly for this conversation, Mao. Today we're going to talk to Governor Sam Brownback about religious persecution in China, about the role of faith and morality in international relations in the U.S.-China relationship, and what it might mean for President Trump's summit happening as we speak in Beijing today. Let's get into it. It is for safety for war with Milwaukee invasion of Hawaii.

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Find unpacking Israeli history wherever you listen to your podcast or on YouTube. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Governor Sam Brownback. Governor Brownback, of course, was governor of Kansas from 2011 to 2018. He's also been a United States senator from that state, a long and distinguished career in public service. He currently is the co-chair of the International Religious Freedom Summit.

He's the chairman of the National Committee for Religious Freedom. He's on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy. And most importantly of all, and the subject of our conversation today, he is the author of a new book, China's War on Faith. Governor Brambeck, thank you so much for coming on School of War. Well, it's a pleasure to join you. I really appreciate you. And as governor and senator of the state of Kansas had multiple major military bases in my state, visited often to Fort Riley, Fort Leavenworth, McConnell Air Base. So I just, I really appreciate people that serve in the military and the strategy that goes into it, because a lot of that for the Army was developed at Fort Leavenworth. And so I got to

listen in and once in a while come in as the politician to interact as the architect to the engineers that were actually going to do things and it was it was an enjoyable thing for me yeah my dad passed through leavenworth at one point in his career as it to be clear as a student not a not in the prison there so so i never i've actually i confess i've never visited but i've heard it um i've heard it spoken of warmly it's good it's a great place uh and i i really enjoy the people that was there And I'm fine with the prison being there, too. It employs a lot of people and has a number of interesting issues as well. So I couldn't think of a better time for this conversation.

I mean, literally at the moment we are recording. So it's 11.24 in the morning here on Wednesday, May the 13th. We have President Trump just off the plane in Beijing as of a couple of hours ago. Welcome to the airport. He's going to be heading in for meetings with Xi Jinping. He has in tow a... a pretty robust delegation of very senior American businessman, essentially, you know, the CEO of NVIDIA. I think I saw Elon Musk boarded Air Force One in Alaska. You've got representatives from

Hollywood. I mean, you have a delegation that sort of illustrates what the president says is on his mind, which is trade and commerce between the United States and China. And we can talk about that. We can talk about his vision of how this summit is supposed to go. But your, your discussion of China, which I think it's important that we don't lose amidst this focus on the trade relationship, is really something that plays out at a moral level. And it's the question of religious freedom in China is the question of really the nature of the Chinese state and what it means to have a relationship with a state like this. And I thought, Governor, I might ask you to get us started by telling us a bit of the backstory here,

we're going to spend most of our time talking about religious persecution in China. But the U.S.-China relationship, long before the CCP was a factor, was a relationship that had questions of Christianity and faith and mission work at the center of it. And I just thought I'd ask you

to kind of give us a bit of an overview of that. What are the roots of all these questions? Well, thanks for asking that. And thank you for having this conversation at this point in time. When this doesn't, appear to be the agenda item that Xi Jinping and Donald Trump were going to be talking about. But it certainly sits there in and between and is a major issue between the United States and

China and our visions of the world. I contend on really right now what you're looking at is this confrontation of civilizations, this clash of civilizations between an authoritarian communistic system and Western democracy, Western civilization that's built on a Judeo-Chiolization. Christian ethic of the individual has inherent dignity and has rights from God. Of course, the CCP is, there's no God, and all rights come from the government, and the government is all powerful. So you've got really, in my estimation, this clash of civilizations. And these are the two big powers in the world, and they're gathering a sphere of influence around them. And I think we're really in the process of breaking these two economies apart that have grown together so intertwined,

now are being broken apart. Historically, the Christian community globally has looked at China as a place to proselytize. I mean, the biggest population on the planet until recently. And just saying, we should send missionaries here that they could share the gospel of Jesus Christ. And some of the most storied missionaries, Hudson Taylor, and then. Then missionaries coming out of China, watchman knee, are just legendary figures in Christendom, in modern Christendom within the past, you know, 150 years. So you've really had this, you know, deep relationship and feeling.

Billy Graham's wife, Ruth, was raised in China, the daughter of missionary parents. You know, it just keeps going back and deep. been, so there has been this storied length of relationship there. The interesting thing that, and one of the things I really got out of the book that I didn't know before and because my vision of China has always been through a communist lens. It's in my lifetime. It's been a communist country. But it's actually a deeply spiritual people from the length of Chinese civilization, which is extraordinary. I love China. I don't love the CCP. I despise what the CCP. I despise what the does. My wife and I have an adopted daughter from China. I've been there many times until I was banned in 2018, 2019, I guess it was. But I love the Chinese civilization. I love the spirituality of it. I despise what the communists have done to it, which the final point on this. They talk about sanitization all the time. Xi Jinping, we've got to sinusize Christianity. We've got to do this and that.

The real carpetbagger in China is communism. It's an industrial-era European ideology. It doesn't fit China. It doesn't fit the Chinese people. And that's why they spent so much time in the cultural revolution and now suppressing religion. And why I argue it's really the key tool, it's the killies heel of the CCP is their war with God and with religion. Tell me a bit more about yourself, Governor, and in particular how you came to focus on this issue. You mentioned your adoptive daughter, but just I am curious, presumably, you know, as a small, as a young person growing up in Kansas,

China issues weren't front of mine. Maybe you'll tell me that they were, but this question of religious freedom broadly and China specifically, how does it come to be a priority for you? You know, really two sources for me. One is I'm a follower, Jesus, accepted Christ as a young, boy growing up on the farm in Kansas, and that's been a transformative part of me. And then second, growing up on that farm, we were very dependent upon global markets. So every day we're listening to what's going on in then the Soviet Union or South America or

Japan if they're buying, because this impacts our livelihood and how we're going to operate. I mean, and it's one of those variables that we don't have any kind of. control over sitting on a small farm in Kansas, but it impacts us and we're interested in it. So those two really, one stirred an interest internationally. The other one really stirred my soul. And then I had, for me, it was a fortunate thing. I had cancer as a 40-year-old man. And up until then, my faith was my faith, but it wasn't operational, really, in my life. It was something that was in my life, but it wasn't on the throne. And once I had, once I had cancer, it was like, okay, and I got to really decide if this is true or not.

I've got to really decide. And I spent a real season and, is this real? And I came away, my faith was alive, it is real, I see God's hand, I see how this works, and it really transformed my life, how I lived. And I want other people to have that experience if they choose it. If they choose not to, that's their choice. That's God gave us free will. But for me, this was transformative.

It saved me. It saved my marriage. It saved my family. And I want other people to be able to have access to that if they choose to and they don't in China. Yeah, it's not clear to me that the Chinese Communist Party takes the same attitude towards choice when it comes to communism. Would you tell me about when you first went to China? What were your first impressions? When was that?

It was 1985. My wife and I had been married for three years. I'd been fascinated with China for some period of time. I've been watching it overseas. I was an agriculture guy. I was a farm broadcaster for a while, so I'm covering these markets, and even on a daily basis. And I had a fascination with it and a loathing of communism. I'd been in the Soviet Union as a national officer with future farmers.

I had seen this horrific system and what it did, how it killed people, how it killed the economy. And I just, I thought this is horrible, but I also thought it had enough superstructure around it that it would last my lifetime, which, of course, it didn't. And I was appreciative of that. But then in China, I was looking to see, well, how did this, how does this system operate here? And I read, oh, gosh, who was the guy, Fox Butterfield, alive in a bitter sea about China. And I saw that in 1985. People were still in Mal suits at that time in riding bicycles in Beijing. Of course, it's not the case now.

But you could see the oppression and feel it in the system of this great civilization and culture. that I admired so much for its depth and what it's done. And I saw that same effect of communism on it, just sucking the soul out of it, and treating everybody as an economic entity only. That's what you are in communism. You are an economic entity. You are not a soul. You don't have a spirit.

There is no eternal life. There is no God. And drilling that into people. And it's so deadening. It just, it just, it deadens the soul, which is their objective, of course. And, but just for me, as a person of faith, I just felt so badly for people that live in that experience. And people being thrown away, little girls, little girls at that time being thrown away because they, in the one child policy, everybody wanted a boy. And so we adopted one of those little girls that, you know, I read about and saw,

and I was traveling then later as a senator and would go into orphanages and, you know, see these kids. And I, well, at least we can do something. We adopted two, two children, not one from Guadal, one from China. So I feel like the conventional take on China and relative oppression would expect that your experience is in the 80s, were of a more, I don't know what word I want here, but a relatively more relaxed China compared to the oppressive Maoism that preceded it. And obviously now, Xi Jinping's sort of return in some ways to the cult of personality, et cetera, that surrounded Mao, certainly the international troublemaking. Is that true on this issue? Do you feel in retrospect like you were there in a

period of a relative opening and liberalization, or to your eyes, was the treatment of Christians and just broadly speaking, the approach to political religious freedom more of a continuity than it gets credit for here. No, I think you nailed it on this sort of ebb and flow within it. And the people we've profiling the book, you can see in their lives some of this ebb and flow. On Mao, it is hammered down, killing people, wiping them out. If you have a, have a faith orientation whatsoever. This is the cultural revolution. The cultural revolution is against that Chinese ancient spiritual culture, slam it down, kill it, wipe it out, put pesticide on it, anything you can do to kill it. Then Deng Xiaoping comes along and says, yeah, whoa, this isn't

exactly working. We need to open up. We need to build up some strength here to this. And that's the period that I come in and I start witnessing China. And, you know, see, when we adopt our daughter in 1999, they've got Santa Claus on the windows in some of the stores, and they've got some Christmas ornaments around, and you're kind of like, I got a place kind of changing, kind of opening up. And it was until Xi Jinping, who brings the hammer back down. But the thing that he's got that they didn't have then that's so increasingly in its effectiveness is all this surveillance technology and the ability to track people and every cell phone. is a tracking device and every electric car has cameras on it and the effort now to digitize the

currency so you can you can literally turn people's money off on them it's just it's a these are dream tools that dictators and authorities have loved wanted to have for years and they've got them now and they've beta tested them particularly initially on the wager Muslims and the Tibetan Buddhists, cameras everywhere, police stations, concentration camps, horrific treatment of individuals, police living in your home with you. And that doesn't stop there in China. That gets exported to other dictators to make them better dictators. That's the thing, too, that I look at this.

I think we don't have a lot of time here to be lollygagging around. with it because when dictators get that sort of technology, they can go right at and find the needle in the haystack of the one guy that's willing to organize people and stand up or resist in some way and pull him out and throw him in jail or kill him. And that's what happens. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly, 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge.

BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. So let's talk about some of the folks that you profile in the book, and I want to ask you to tell us the story, and forgive me, if I mispronounce any of these names, but you'll correct me. but the story of Peter Shoe, who you characterize as the Billy Graham of China, why is this story important to you and what does it illustrate about freedom in China and the U.S.-China relationship? Well, I love Peter Shoe.

This guy's amazing to me. What it illustrates is the ebb and flow of China. Actually, he starts out in the cultural revolution and even before that in the, I think, the four cleansing camps. So he's at the very start of when Mao's coming in and wiping people out and pushing the culture from agrarian to industrial and trying to just kill Chinese civilization. And so it also tells us history of Chinese Christianity. His mom starts out. They start the house church because she can't walk very far because she has bound feet because of that era of China culture.

The small feet were considered beautiful. and so they bound the little girl's feet, well, once you bind their feet and they can't walk very well, she couldn't go very far to church, so they started a home church. And he ends up being one of the main founders of the house church movement, particularly in the rural areas in China. But he shows this ebb and flow. Then it opens up under Deng Xiaoping and things start expanding, and then it starts hammering back down. And then he also, he's part of the back to Jerusalem movement for Chinese Christians who they believe, they have been particularly hardened and developed to carry the gospel to finish the circumnavigation of the gospel, back through Central Asia, back to Jerusalem. And so he just really tells that story,

but he also looks at how dark the Chinese Communist Party is. He said yesterday, and I wrote the quote down, he says, they're revealing their inner darkness now as they are strong. The Deng Xiaopin, PING philosophy was you just, you hide until you get strong enough to be able to reveal your strength. And then he talks about we must restrain the power of the darkness, of how dark and evil this regime is, which is something we just don't fathom like we should in the West. This is an evil regime, at least as evil as the Soviet Union, and I would argue more so. And it's killed more of its own people than any regime.

in the history of mankind. And we treat them as kind of a normal trading partner and no big deal. And you've got three genocides going on. And you've wiped out more of your people than any other regime ever in the history of mankind. And you want to take over the world. Oh, well. What do you mean? Oh, well.

And they are at war with us, whether we are at war with them. And the sooner we can wake up to that and start going, okay, these two systems are going to class. and they are in clash. And we just got to stop feeding the beast on the other side here as soon as we can. You know, maybe we can use Peter Shue's case to illustrate, but feel free to draw on other examples. But what is the CCP playbook when it comes to Christianity? Again, we can also cite other religious movements in China.

But what are the, what's the grab bag of tactics, procedures for dealing with what they see clearly as a threat to the state? Well, initially, you grab the leaders, and they've got a term for it. The Christian leaders, they call it, they may disappear into a noun. You've been disappeared. People disappear. We feature Pastor Pan, who got his whole congregation out. When he signed on to a letter by Pastor Wang Yi, who was a public intellectuals now in jail and China, and a nine-year sentence, and I kind of doubt they ever let him out.

He said in a sermon that we're all sinners, including Xi Jinping, and we all have to repent of our sins. And when I read that, boy, you're really asking for it now. You call the great leader a sinner. and he's sitting in a jail now hardly hearing from his family. But the playbook is first you go after the leaders. Then you start picking the people and you make real examples of the leader. You put Peter's shoe in jail five times.

They hung him in a cross formation for four hours, nearly killed him. If you can't do that and you're willing to be lenient and they get to be enough of a profile the Christians become trading material with the United States. So Peter Shue was traded out during the most favored nation status fight during the Clinton-Bush transition times when we granted permanent MFN to China. And many of us, including myself, believed that China was changing. It was opening up. It was going to be different. It was going to evolve economically, that politically. And we would move forward. And it was just, I feel defrauded. in that phase. But I fell for it, wanted to fall for it, honestly. I wanted to see them change

that way. And they've just since used that economic investment that we put in them and the goods we purchase to build this phenomenal military and continuing to build nuclear weapons off of our money. That's what we're dealing with is an evil regime and evil empire. And we've got to wake ourselves up to that fact and confront it. So the playbook involves imprisoning key leaders. You know, what else? Is there, for example, is there a counter, you know, information campaign? Like, what is the messaging within China to, say, party members, for example, about what

Christianity is or any other religious threat, Phalam Gong, you know, Islam with the Uyghurs, etc? They're evil cults. They call them evil cults. And they're protecting the people from the evil cult is what they're doing. They, as I mentioned, you know, I mean, they're arresting the leaders. They are changing the Bible. And then in all the state-run churches, there's an official church. There's a state Protestant church.

There's a state Catholic church. There's a state Buddhist association. There's a state association of these groups. And you can practice your faith within that state. apparatus, but all the material, and all the sermons are examined, you have to stay with that sermon, and you can't deviate from this. And then you also have to post pictures of Xi Jinping, sayings of Xi Jinping, you sing hymns of the great Communist Party in China, along with the Christian hymnals. It's an indoctrination. They try to kind of take over the church and say,

you're okay as long as you do this that benefits socialism and it benefits the one-party dictatorship. So that's kind of how they control the above-ground church. And then if you're underground, the rest of you, arrest leaders, you're charged with sedition, you're charged with misuse of information. And the crackdown has intensified, particularly now on Christians. they previously have already gone at Tibetan Buddhism, and now they want to appoint the next Dalai Lama. They claim the right to appoint the next Dalai Lama, which is ludicrous for an atheist system

to appoint the Dalai Lama, really? And Islam, they have suppressed, and they've got cameras all over the mosque. So if anybody's seen, the facial recognition system is you get downgraded on a social credit score, which makes it harder for you to travel, get an education, harder on people that contact you

because they track who contacts your cell phone. So if you're the bad guy, that's one thing for you. But anybody that contacts you also gets your problems in the social credit score to help keep people down. Those are all systems they're doing. And then they're moving to the digitization of the currency, as I mentioned earlier, to be able to literally shut your money off.

You wouldn't be able to buy or sell without the mark of the beast. You know, it's interesting. We talk a lot about how the digital revolution is playing out in war fighting here on School of War and, you know, what firms like Palantir and so forth do with the U.S. military and militaries of our allies, et cetera. And that's the context in which we're usually talking about this kind of tech. We probably should talk more about its use for domestic repression, which you're outlining

right now in China. And just to me, it hammers home the important. of why among the reasons why the competition of the china matters is we really do have in in the midst of this technological revolution which is just overturning the world and it's overturning all of our lives at home too just the advent of big data of AI like this this is going to condition the human future one way or the other and a politics where not only is it an option but indeed it's necessary for the survival of the state to harness this technology. for oppression, that that country might prevail in a competition with the United States such that

is conditioning the shape of the human future is deeply, deeply concerning to me in the text of the part of that story. And it should be deeply concerning to you. And as somebody involved in politics, I see the ability now to target an individual voter with the message I want them to get and kind of tilt it just right to where I'm the good guy, or he's the bad guy that I'm running against in this. Well, imagine if you got that in the hands of an authoritarian state. And what they can do to the mental piece of what you're thinking as an individual by controlling that impact.

And they've got, of course, the great Chinese internet firewall that you can't get information freely in or out. Or although I think we should be funding systems that allow people to get information in and out. And we can do that and we should be doing that. But it's your point exactly. I mean, look at the modern warfare, and I don't know warfare, but I'm watching Russia and Iran deploy the system, but particularly Russia and Ukraine, fighting these systems back in front on men,

this is a whole different thing than what I'm familiar with. Well, now put that in your social political context. And it's there, and I'm looking at it going, you know, as I mentioned, these are tools. Dictators have dreamed of happening for years. That's why I think our window is short that if you don't get ahead of this, you've kind of lost the mental battle for the population and you've lost the leaders that could have come forward in that population because they all got, they all got pulled out and they got thrown in jail or

disappeared. So this summit is underway as we speak. I'm going to aim to have this episode up while it's still ongoing. the president, President Trump clearly has trade on his mind and better relationships for U.S. businesses. You had said earlier in the episode that it seems like we're in the process of disentangling the U.S. and Chinese economies. And to an extent, I mean, I think there has been some level of bipartisan support for looking at that to include from within the Trump administration, depending on which day of the week it's been in both his first and second terms.

But clearly, right now, some sort of reentangling in terms of very, good deals for American companies or however the administration is framing it is sort of front of mind for these guys. If you were there, which obviously you're not allowed into China, which to me is a badge of honor. What would you be advising the president? How do you balance these economic considerations with the kinds of questions of political freedom, religious freedom that you're pointing to? You know, I don't know that I would play it. substantially different than he is right now because of the timing issue. Well, clearly they got to had us over the barrel and still have us over the barrel on these rare earth minerals. Not that they're,

not that they're rare, but they're tough to process. And you've got to build the processing plans up. And then we can find them other places, but it's going to take you time and lots of money to invest to get those. So, you know, you kind of shame on us. We should have seen that one coming. And they just bought the market out from underneath it and subsidized the production of it, and we are where we are. But you're going to need a couple years to disentangle that. You're going to need a couple years to disentangle the supply chain from the United States that's so dependent and that in the West on China. But you're seeing that now taking place. I mean, direct foreign investment has fallen precipitously in China from overseas, and you're seeing these companies now find other supply sources.

You're seeing direct foreign investment climb dramatically in the United States, but those things take years. They take time to really bank into, and it's like president probably needs to buy some time to really, okay, we got ourselves in a bad spot here. But I also want to say that China did a wrong thing, and we have done this before, and I experienced the agriculture background when we had high soybean prices in what was of the 70s. or the 80s, and we said to Japan, yeah, we're not going to export to you now because soybean prices are too high. Well, the Japanese go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing here? Well, no, okay, we didn't mean it. We're going to go back. And so we went back. So, well, they said, okay, we got the message. And they started opening markets and production systems up in Brazil and Argentina to become a major competitor of ours. And so I look at it and I was going,

this was brain dead on our part, because these are commodities. And I thought this was a bad move on China's part. It was a play you get to play once. You can play that one once. But that's going to take us time. And so you've got to spend a little bit of time. My thinking is here is in our theater engagement strategy with China, one of our big cards is religious freedom.

And it is a principal of the United States. it's what the country was founded upon. It is something that the Chinese Communist Party fears more than our aircraft carriers or our nuclear weapons, is religious freedom. And we should pound that. And we should drive it around the world. And we should do the Ronald Reagan thing and say that godless commies here. And look what they're doing to the Jewish refusenics, who weren't that many in the USSR, but it delegitimize the regime. We should be doing that in our theater engagement strategy as you disson.

as, okay, okay, we're just trying to calm the atmosphere right now, which is what I would hope actually would come out of this Xi, Trump meeting this time around, just really trying to kind of, let's just get the boil down here for a little while, because we're not ready for this. But meanwhile, I would be, if they raised Taiwan, I would raise religious freedom. We don't want to talk about Taiwan. You don't want to talk about religious freedom. Well, I do. And it's basic to America. And actually, It is one of the strongest suits we have. And it's not just Christians. It's Fallen Gong. It's Buddhists. It's Muslims. You should let them in.

And we should go. This one I would use specifically. And this is a go-forward basis. It's the only country I found in the world that you can't name legally a child Muhammad is in China. That's interesting. I didn't know that. I don't think the 50 Muslim majority countries. in the world know that either.

I would be going to those guys all the time. Do you really want China? You want to be in the China sphere and you can't name your child Muhammad? Has that seemed to you kind of not a good thing? And I would start going at these guys more. I think we ought to start showing maps, and this is down, we're not going to do this right now,

but of the real China, not the one that has Tibet and Sinja on that are a part of it, because those aren't any. more part of China than Lithuania was a part of the Soviet Union. But we don't show the world that. And that, the Chinese hate that stuff. They want Tibet, I mean, they want Taiwan and say, we don't think you ought to have Taiwan. But by the way, if you think you ought to have Taiwan, why don't you give up Tibet and East Turkestan?

They aren't yours. You claim Taiwan. Oh, what about, how do you claim Tibet? That was never a part of China. East Turkestan, this is a Turkish population. They're Muslims. They aren't Han Chinese. I mean, and I would even send vice president, secretary of state,

to meet with the Dalai Lama in substantive talks. And then bring into the White House people that have been persecuted for their faith in China, including the fallen gong. These guys are really important. important, the fallen gong. Say more about them. You know, for years, I kind of didn't believe what they were saying. It was just too much.

Forced organ harvesting, the treatment, the harsh, harsh treatment they got. And I couldn't understand why they treat these guys so rough? And then it finally dawned on me. It's an indigenous Asian religion, Eastern religion. religion. When they allowed it to grow in that Deng Xiaoping era, it went from zero to 90 million adherents in seven years. Freaked the communist out. They came down on a hammer with them, but it's because it's just natural. It's what grandma used to do. She would go to the Buddhist temple and she would go to the Taoist temple and she kind of blended these, which the synchronization is

not a particular problem for Eastern religion in this situation? Well, the guy that developed at Lu Hong-Zu, who is exiled to the United States, he's in the United States, and comes out with this, and it takes off. It's like wheat sewn on the Kansas soil. It just grows. And they, the Chinese government came after them, and they then now in the West, and other places that formed epoch, time. and other groups and have a list

they claim of hundreds of millions of former communists who want communism done away with and they want the old Chinese culture coming back. And all Falun Gong actually really wants is the old Chinese civilization before communism.

That's all they're really after. And I'm thinking, why aren't we working with these guys more? That's part of my really, I want to appeal to people in your sphere and in your podcast that these are people that we really ought to be talking to a lot more about what they know and what they want. And they're

very much aligned with us. Well, I will say a lot of what you're promoting, Governor, sort of cuts against what I would take to be the fashion in right-of-center foreign policy thinking right now, probably in left-of-center foreign policy thinking as well, just because I detect a certain discomfort with Christianity there. But on the right, it's less that and more I'll just make an argument for you, and I'm curious your response. I would take the trend in right-wing foreign policy thinking to run something like this in recent years. China's problem, probably the biggest problem we face,

massive strategic threat. We need hard power deterrence of China in the Western Pacific. But we need to cool, I mean, in a way, it relates to what you were saying in a way of it's very different. We need to cool the temperature in other respects. All these broad questions of competition run the risk of getting us into war, particular competition about political systems, particular competition about what you might consider internal and domestic matters. And what we really need is a future where the United States and China can respect each other's peers, or China gives up dreams of further territorial expansion or undermining the strategic situation of U.S. Allies. But we may have to give a little to get a little too. And if China wants to assert itself

in certain ways, we may need to just allow that while we continue to do our business here in the Western Hemisphere. And ultimately, the objective here is to preserve our security. And ultimately, the objective here is to preserve our security and prevent World War III. I don't necessarily endorse that view, but it does strike me as a popular one on the right right now. How do you respond to it? A couple of ways. Number one, the world's too small for that scenario to last very long. China has made too many inroads. They are already at war with us, and the sooner we realize we're at war with them, the more options we have and the than the better we can come at them. It's similar to discovering cancer earlier in you rather than later, a second one.

And then finally, what you describe, and it's appealing in a sense is where it's just kind of, it's just not, you go over there, we go over here and that all work. That's what we had in detente with the Soviet Union. That was basically detente. and how did that work for us? They built more missiles. They got stronger. They expanded in other places around the world all the while.

We're just kind of, yeah, well, we're okay. And Reagan comes in, and he says, no, this is an evil regime. He went right to the core of what the regime was about. This is an evil regime. Look what they do to the Jewish Refused Nix and the evangelicals in the Soviet Union. And the only answer to this is we win, you lose. And he goes right at calling it evil for what it was. I mean, if you read the book or people in your read the book, China's War on Faith that we put out,

you will see diabolical tactics being used by the Chinese Communist Party on people of faith in particular. Because they studied this fall of the Soviet Union and they saw really faith was a piece. of this, particularly when it came to Poland, Catholic Church, you got a Catholic Pope that shows up and says, be not afraid. And the Polish citizens, they hadn't been to Mass in decades, but they remained Catholic inside them. And they remember Grandma, and she was a good lady. That's what I'm saying, you've got that same play, and it's really our most powerful play. against the CCP, and it's one we've got to play. And I don't know, maybe I'm out of the mainstream of current thinking,

but I can sure see this evil, and you know it's coming. And by the way, I really think what President Trump has done on cutting off the oil supply out of Venezuela and Iran to the CCP, brilliant, beautiful move. Now, you know, it's got a lot of tail with it. But wow, and if we get Cuba in a bank shot, one of the best foreign policy moves I've seen. But I think you've got to go at this on a moral basis. And the final point in this, weak as part of the U.S. military is U.S. public opinion. And everybody around the world knows that.

You can sell this point to the American public that the godless commies in China are keeping people from doing with their own soul what they see fit. Doesn't that make your American blood boil? I'll ask you to close, Governor, with you mentioned, you know, horrific things. We've talked about a couple stories so far, but maybe you'll close us with, if you only had one story to tell about religious persecution in China to stick with viewers' minds, what would it be? You know, I told you the story of Peter Shue. I would probably tell the story of Wang Chun Yan. She's a Falling Gong practitioner. I'm not a Falun Gong practitioner.

I have great respect for the people that follow that. She couldn't sleep. She had a great business that was going. She felt like she was killing herself because she was just so tense and nervous. And somebody introduces her to Falling Gong, the practice really saves her life. Her estimate she starts sharing that around. They arrest her. She serves her term, gets out.

But then she still is believer in following. Long Gong practices it, shares the material on it. She can't go home then because they're going to arrest her again. They end up killing her husband with his death. That kills his dad commits suicide with the death of his son. She gets arrested a second time. Eventually does get out of jail. They type test her blood to see if she's good for an organ transplant, but she's got high blood pressure so she doesn't clear through the system.

they let her go and she gets out on the back of a gangster's motorcycle into Thailand. And I remember asking her, I said, well, you're a little scared about being on a motorcycle with a gangster? And she said, no, they had more morals than the CCP did. And it's that type of faith and commitment. And all she wants is the old Chinese civilization back. I just so admire and I look at it as a policy person thinking, these are people we ought to be working with and knowing a lot better and engaging with and using this card of religion.

Most people, 80% of the world's population, claims a religion of some type. And here you've got a godless regime that wants to rule the world. We've got to play that in our confrontation. with China. Sam Brownback, the book is called China's War on Faith. I'm grateful to you for making the time to come on School of War and talk about it, sir. My pleasure. Thank you. You're one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets. Yes? Good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different, locked in, loyal, invested. They're called fans. Fans don't just listen to music. They feel seen by it, like it belongs to them.

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