The Barefoot Lawyer Reports is proud to announce the publication of a research paper from The Center for Human Rights. It addresses the establishment of illegal policing and surveillance stations by the Chinese Communist Party in America and other countries. To read this research paper, go to catholic.edu/chr and go to our research and analyses page.

Bill Saunders: Hi, this is Bill Saunders. Welcome to another episode of The Barefoot Lawyer Presents. This is a special episode with Dr. Lee Edwards. We’re coming to you from The Center for Human Rights at the Catholic University of America. Lee got his PhD from Catholic University, and he’s also the founder of the Victims of Communism Museum and Memorial. And on this podcast, he and I will be discussing communism and its threats to human freedom and its discord with Catholic  social thought. Lee, welcome.

Lee Edwards: My pleasure to be here, Bill. Thank you for asking me.

Bill Saunders: Let’s just start. I found it interesting that a couple of weeks ago we had the 40th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s speech to bring down the Berlin Wall and kind of signaled the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union and the soviet empire, which was the great communist empire that had really threatened the West and the whole world ever since the end of World War II.

So we can go in whatever direction you want to go with that, but I just want at some point to return to the question of whether the Chinese Communist Party is creating a new evil empire, so I’ll turn it over to you.

Lee Edwards: Well, that’s a very intriguing and almost irresistible idea. And that is just exactly how powerful it is. What are the intentions of China and the Chinese Communist Party? If I could jump and talk a little bit about that, then we can talk about some broader things regarding communism.

Some 30 years ago, almost 40 years ago now, Deng Xiaoping talked about how we’re going to have communism with Chinese characteristics here in China. And this was following some of the egregious and bloody experiments in communism under Mao Zedong. First, a Great Leap Forward when some–at least 40 million–perhaps as many as 60 million Chinese died because Mao tried to communize and centralize all of the agriculture in China. People just kept dying, dying, dying, dying. Finally, even he had to admit that that was all that could happen.

Bill Saunders: Yeah, I just want to, for one second, for anybody listening, pause, listen, and think about that number. He just said 40 to 60 million dead. So when we talk about what communism has done to the world, there’s all this idealistic talk about communism, but the fact is it’s caused perhaps more deaths than any other political system. And in China, between 40 and 60 million from this Great Leap Forward alone. So you said Deng came in and he wanted to move to communism with Chinese characteristics? 

Lee Edwards: Yes, and to bring about a little bit of the confusion of the idea of balance of life and politics. But before that happened and following the Great Leap Forward, Mao initiated what was called the “Great Cultural Revolution” and went after the four “O”s: old ways, old customs, old ideas.

And again, the Chinese people said, we don’t want to go that way. And Mao said, “But that’s the way I want to go”. Unleash the red guards. These young people who took professors like you and me, Bill, stuck us in the corner, and put a dunce gap on us, and made us stand and abjectly apologize for talking about the bad ideas.

Probably at least one million, perhaps as many as three million more people died under the cultural revolution. Plus that society was just ripped apart by Mao. Finally, Mao died, succeeded by Deng Xiaoping, who said, “We’re going to do something different here.” People said, “Okay, at last they’re going to adopt not just Chinese characteristics, but capitalist characteristics”. And that’s good, because we know that inevitably was the argument at the time, that following economic freedom there will be political freedom. And so we waited and we waited and we waited for that to happen. And we’re still waiting and we can see the real face of China as expressed in how they’re treating the Uyghurs in western China and trying to wipe out their culture, their language, their society, just as they tried with the Tibetans back in the fifties and the sixties.

We don’t know exactly how many, but we do know, again, perhaps one million Uyghurs, perhaps two million Uyghurs have died. And other Midians have been put in so called “re-education camps” in which they’re being forced to mouth President Xi’s thought, which is based upon Mao’s thought, which is tyrannical, which is based upon marxist thought, which is planning and direction in which the government makes all the decisions for the people. 

Bill Saunders: 

That is materialistic and atheistic.

Lee Edwards: Their number one target is private property. And their second major target is religion, which Marx called the “opium of the people”, trying to stamp it out. Particularly when Mao came into power back in the forties in the fifties we know that thousands of priests and nuns and pastors and buddhist leaders were just killed, just slaughtered.

And this was something which the communists have done in country after country after country.

Bill Saunders: So the Communist Party in China is dictatorial, intolerant, and hateful of religion. So what do you think about it becoming an evil empire?

Lee Edwards: To maintain control over the people of China, which now number about 1.4 billion people, Deng Xiaoping, now, and Xi presently, have turned the conduct of affairs over to the Communist Party. There are now 93 million members of the Chinese Communist Party and they are everywhere. They have permeated society. They have permeated schools, they have permeated classrooms, they have permeated factories. Everywhere that you look, the military that you look at, the Chinese Communist Party is there. And so this is one of the definitions of totalitarianism. That’s what China is today, notwithstanding its allowing certain free, I won’t say free enterprises, but certain capitalistic characteristics to be practiced.

If you look at the fact that the press is controlled? Yes. Is the military controlled by the Party? Yes. Is free speech controlled by the Party? Yes. Is the judiciary controlled by the Party? Yes. So in six out of the seven characteristics–as defined by Zbigniew Brzezinski–which characterize totalitarianism, China qualifies in six out of the seven.

There’s only this sort of modicum and really modicum of, you might say, capitalism, which is attempted. But even there, you know, I had the opportunity some 15 years ago to visit China, and spend a couple of weeks there lecturing at the People’s University in Beijing and Fudan University in Shanghai on American conservatism. And you could see these wonderful skyscrapers going up. And I said to my communist handler, who was there most nights, but certainly during the day with me , “Shanghai is the city of a thousand skyscrapers.” And she loved that idea because Chinese love numbers.

And my colleague from Heritage, John Tasik, said, “Wait a minute, Lee, who owns those skyscrapers?” And in every case, it is either the Party, the Chinese Communist Party, or the PLA, the People’s Liberation Army, or the children of the officials who run and who run the party. So there is no freedom, true freedom. 

You’ll appreciate this, here we are talking about faith and religion, and here we are on the campus of Catholic University of America. And so I told my young handler I wanted to go to church. So it came Sunday, and she took me to this magnificent, beautiful cathedral in downtown Beijing.

And we walked in, and there was some incense, and there were some bells, and there was a packed congregation of a very large cathedral, probably several thousand people, right? All just jammed in. I said, “Oh, this is really impressive.” Putting aside who declared who was going to be the bishop of that particular church, I said, “How many Catholic churches are there in Beijing?”

And she said very proudly, “Oh, we have another one. So we have two.” Beijing at the time had about 20 billion people. You can be sure that at least 10% were Catholic, and perhaps more than that, trying to live their faith in the so-called underground church. And yet they only allowed two churches to be built and to take care of those people who want to draw closer to our Lord.

So wherever I went, you could feel this invisible–in some cases not so invisible–structure which was hemming in and taking care of the people. And it seems to me that the image that I took away from my trip there in China was Tiananmen Square, where the massacre occurred in June of 1989. We don’t know how many hundreds or thousands of young people, students, were massacred on that day. But looming over Tiananmen Square is this gigantic portrait of Mao Zedong. He is always there. And this is the visible, visual representation of the party and of communism there in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing.

Bill Saunders: Well, we know China’s extraterritorial ambitions through their Belt and Road Initiative, and we know of their recent, rather amazing statement between Chairman Xi and Vladimir Putin about they were going to set the agenda for the world, for the progress of the world for the next hundred years.

And we know China’s efforts to infiltrate the United States through all kinds of organizations and institutions, including confucian institutes on campus, including Hollywood. The fact that Hollywood is so intimidated by the thought of losing that market in China that it refuses to make a film of the life of Guangcheng, our distinguished fellow, which is an incredible story of how he escaped, because they don’t want to upset the Chinese.

Same thing with business. Many of our corporations seem more invested in making money in China than they do in being good citizens in America. I think China is certainly the greatest threat in the world today to democracy and freedom. In my view, it’s stepped into the shoes of the Soviet Union, and we need political leadership like Ronald Reagan that will take it on and bring it down.

Lee Edwards: Never before has China engaged in this kind of imperial search. This is what communism has done to China. It’s always been content to be the middle kingdom, to be there and to just engage in trade, but always to sort of stay within its own boundaries. But that’s not the case today. Under communism, under the Chinese Communist Party, China is aggressively seeking to communize the world, which was, of course, Lenin’s number one goal internationally: to make sure we can’t be satisfied with just communism in one country. We want to communize the world. 

Well, here is China, 100 years after Lenin’s death, carrying out one of his major issues. You mention, Bill, all the various ways in which the communists are actively seeking to influence us here at home in the United States. And let’s not forget industrial espionage, which was so bad and still continues in certain areas that even the Obama administration had to shut down the consulate in Houston because they were engaging in such flagrant espionage, trying to steal our secrets and a whole variety of high tech and military oriented pursuits and work.

Bill Saunders: Right. Everything from the furniture industry to the missile industry, you know, every researcher in some frontier that China is interested in, they’ll either offer them a lot of money–secretly and illegally– or they will often put pressure on the person is of Chinese descent, put pressure on him by saying his relatives who still live in China are at risk, and they’re forced to cooperate in that way.

The Chinese Communist Party or communist China is just a massive threat to the United States and to the whole world. And of course, I mean, the irony of it all is why are they able to do the things you were talking about? Some of this espionage, I mean, some they steal, but some they steal by bribery and stuff.

Why do they have all this money? Because of all the trade. And I remember, Lee, that I was very active opposing China’s accession to the World Trade Organization around the year 2000. And there was a huge coalition of people from conservatives to liberals, Hollywood folks, and country preachers, and lots of people saying no, because you’re rewarding a regime that denies basic human rights.

But the friends of the communist party were the business community– not all the business community– said to let them into the WTO because they’re a huge market. The WTO has rules. They will learn to be law-abiding citizens for the rest of their lives outside of the business world–like in the way they treat the Tibetans or the Uyghurs–by having to follow the rules of the WTO. That is laughable. We didn’t buy it at the time, but in hindsight, it is a laughable argument, because all they did, they’re corrupting the WTO, and they still oppress everybody else. So the stick that we had, or the carrot of the WTO, we gave it to them. They don’t have any incentive to be law abiding. 

Lee Edwards: And in point of fact, what they have done is to corrupt us because our companies are over there. And to do business, you have to allow ownership not from an American Company, but from the Party or the army or the golden children of the top officials.

I have to say, Bill, that when I was there visiting in both Beijing and Shanghai and I looked around and you could almost see as many Starbucks there jammed with young Chinese and not so young Chinese having their lattes for $5 a pop. Same thing with, well, I’m going to mention a KFC as well. Kentucky Fried chicken also had many, many, many outposts, shall we say. And the Chinese were really, I think, laughing at us and saying, “You thought that you could change us. We are changing you.” That’s the danger. They are changing us, suborning us, corrupting us with their style and with their control of all decisions made from top to bottom.

You’ve been listening to part one of a Barefoot Lawyer Report special featuring Dr. Lee Edwards, founding chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial foundation. Check back next week for part two.