You’re listening to part one of an interview with Raleigh Adams, a first place winner of the 2025 Human Rights Essay Contest, hosted by the Catholic University of America’s Center for Human Rights. The interview is conducted by Dr. William Saunders, Director of the Center for Human Rights. To listen to the rest of this interview, check the link in the description or go to humanrights.catholic.edu.
Wiiam Saunders: Hi, I’m William Saunders. I’m the Director of the Center for Human Rights at the Catholic University of America, where our distinguished fellow is Chen Guangcheng, who is the barefoot lawyer for which this podcast is named. Usually, Guangcheng is on the podcast, but today, I am doing an interview with a winner in our essay contest about the threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party to America.
We have these essay contests every year in the spring and summer, and if you’re interested in these, I hope you will go to our webpage and you can find out more information, which is humanrights.catholic.edu. And in the near future, you will see our winner, who is Raleigh Adams.
You will see her essay there on the webpage, and you can read the whole thing. I’ll return to the essay in just a second, but I wanna introduce her to you. So welcome, Raleigh.
Raleigh Adams: Hi. It’s a pleasure to be with you guys.
W: So Raleigh, uh, tell us, you’re a graduate student at Yale. Is that correct?
R: Yes. I am a Master’s of Ethics [student] at the Yale Divinity School.
W: I can’t say enough good things about this essay. I think it was beautifully written and also integrated a number of, kind of, complicated things, presented them in a way that’s very accessible for the reader, even though there are footnotes and things, as all our essays have them.
So I’m gonna let Raleigh talk about her essay. We’re gonna talk about it. But I do wanna read from the opening paragraph. “The Chinese Communist Party, or the CCP, poses a uniquely grave threat to American democracy. Beyond geopolitical rivalry, its influence strikes at the moral and cultural foundations of our society, the dignity of the human person, the integrity of civic institutions, and the preservation of the common good.
Confronting this challenge demands more than procedural fixes; it requires defending the moral and spiritual ecology that sustains democratic life, an ecology rooted in the American commitment to liberty and self-government, and for many, enriched by Catholic social teaching.”
So I’ll take one more kind of footnote here. One of the other things we have at Catholic University is, I am, in addition to being the Director of the Center, I also am a professor, and I have a Master’s program in Human Rights from the Catholic perspective.
So Raleigh and I will talk about this a little bit, but for anybody who’s listening that’s not a Catholic, it’s basically… you don’t have to be a Catholic to get the point here. It emphasizes things that are central certainly to the Christian tradition, and I would even say much of it is central to the secular liberal tradition, such as, just mentioned, as she said in her essay, the dignity of the human person, the integrity of civic institutions, and the common good.
So with all that having been said, again, uh, Raleigh, welcome. Tell us a little bit about your essay. I’m curious if… whether you have been following issues having to do with the Communist Party, the Chinese Communist Party, and its influence in America before you did this essay.
R: Yeah, of course. So I was blessed to partake actually in CUA’s Rhope Kiwotiba Program, where part of our, kind of, curriculum was not only the encyclicals and the issues from the magisterium that inform Catholic social teaching, but also how those apply to our contemporary world.
And one of those actually was how America as a great power interacts with other rising great powers, including China. That was a fellowship undertaken my senior year of undergrad, and that kind of sparked my interest in how Catholic social teaching interacts with these great powers competitions.
And that really sent me down the road; I think in a providential way for thinking about issues that this essay tackled. And I think particularly close to my heart as an aspiring academic are the issues of the Confucius Centers that were on the rise only a few years back in America, as well as the issue of the Uyghurs and the Chinese territorial area, and the treacheries that they have undertaken.
So I think very much so I took an educational and a human rights focused interest in the Chinese Communist Party.
W: You know, again, I wanna mention for the listeners in case they’re a new listener – and frankly I hope we’ll get a lot of new listeners – I hope Raleigh’s people she knows will listen and other people, because part of what we’re trying to do with this whole essay contest as well as the podcast is to raise, really, the very issues that Raleigh mentioned in the introduction to her essay with the American people.
We think it’s essential for the American people as citizens in a democracy to think about these issues, because the issues are very… They have [a] big impact on our own civic life. And one of the things Raleigh just mentioned was this, Confucius Institutes…. Why don’t you say just a word about that?
R: Yeah, of course. So the Confucius Institutes, thankfully they’re on the decline now. And in the beginning of Trump’s first administration, he kind of tackled those as an issue. But they were centers of thought at universities, especially in major metropolitan areas that tried to integrate Chinese thought into the American public.
And they were not domestically funded. They were funded from the Chinese Communist Party, and they really sought to infuse Chinese thought to… The metaphor of a plant comes to mind. Almost the same way that plants compete in their root systems, they were trying to compete in the root system of American thought.
W: You say Chinese thought, it’s Chinese Communist thought, because they were kind of a Trojan horse, right? They presented themselves as Chinese institutes, as if they were bringing a kind of traditional Chinese culture. But they were a front, in most cases, for the Chinese Communist Party. And again, just for the listeners, Guangcheng talks about this all the time.
He’s a big supporter of traditional Chinese culture. The CCP is Marxist. You know, it’s been imposed on the Chinese people by a totalitarian government, so it’s not Chinese in any real sense.
R: Yes, as said, my apologies. And actually, later in the essay, I do tackle the fact that Chinese culture and thought have great, great value and great dignity to them, as all cultures do. But as, as you mentioned, Professor, this was, as you said, kind of a Trojan horse that was trying to attack the root system of liberal democracy and American democracy, being this subtle but insidious threat.
W: You know, uh, again, I’ll mention for the listeners, we have a research paper on the website on these Confucius Institutes. We worked with one of the law students to produce it. So, if you want to learn more about this whole issue, go back and we also did a podcast with the writer of that.
So if you go to our website, again, it’s humanrights.catholic.edu, you can find that. Now, you also talk, Raleigh, about sharp power and soft power. Tell, tell us what you mean.
R: Yeah, of course. So this idea of soft power is something that, personally, I think that the American and liberal democratic tradition do well. It’s this more humanitarian aspect, this kind of shaping of a people in mores, rather than this sharp power of the CCP’s manipulation of openness and trust to undermine free discourse.
W: Yeah, one of the things, the points that you make in your essay is how the CCP uses what are the marks of American democracy against it; as you say, the weaponization of openness and trust. And again, that’s why we’re trying to educate people, because most Americans are open and they trust, but these folks, the CCP is working to use that against us.
So go ahead and tell us more about what you said in your essay.
R: Yeah, of course. So my paper argues that the Chinese Communist Party poses not only, as you said, a geopolitical challenge, but a moral and spiritual one to American democracy. The CCP’s strategy of sharp power corrodes moral ecology, that being truth, dignity, and civic virtue that sustains free societies and liberal democracies.
And I argue that the right response must combine policy vigilance with a moral renewal, enforcing transparency in foreign influence, strengthening civic and moral education, defending academic freedom, and grounding all of this in an affirmation of human dignity, which is drawn in great part from Catholic social teaching.
The Catholic University of America’s Center for Human Rights has published a documentary on the United Nations’ Universal Declaration on Human Rights. The documentary features world-class human rights experts, from former State Department officials to ambassadors and human rights activists. It can be found on our website at humanrights.catholic.edu.
Read Raleigh’s award-winning essay here: https://humanrights.catholic.edu/renewing-the-moral-ecology-of-freedom/