Washington Summit Sees End of Communist Rule in China
Plus—Harvard’s 17 outside lawyers want fees secret until after fundraising season ends.
President Trump’s scheduled meeting in South Korea tomorrow with the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, is getting lots of attention already and will get more. But for a clearer and longer-term analysis of what will happen in China and in U.S.-China relations, the meeting that may matter more is one that happened Tuesday in Washington—a China Forum convened by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
The president and CEO of the foundation, Eric Patterson, introducing the foundation’s senior Fellow in China Studies, Adrian Zenz, said, “it’d be easy to think that the leader of our China studies team would be someone who would be dour or bitter or have a level of hatred, but that is not the case for our team. And frankly, it’s not the case for the Victims of Communism Foundation.” Instead, Patterson said, “what animates our China studies team is actually a love of the Chinese people. Whether they’re Han or Tibetan or Hong Konger or Uyghur, whether they’re Buddhist or Muslim or Christian or atheist, whether they’re men or women or children, we’d like to see them all liberated from the totalitarian surveillance state of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Zenz made the point that the outcome for the Chinese people also has real implications for the U.S. and its allies.
“Longstanding views within national security circles posit a false dichotomy between the hard interests of security and a soft advocacy of human rights,” Zenz said. “This is a critical analytical deficiency. Global events and the strategies of autocracies like China and Russia demonstrate that human rights are not a peripheral concern but are foundational to the national security, stability and freedoms of Western democracies.”
Zenz said that “the examples of China and Russia clearly demonstrate that a state’s internal repression is foundational to understanding its external strategy. How an autotocracy treats its most vulnerable citizens and minority groups is not a peripheral matter. It is a primary indicator of its strategic culture and international intent.”
“Consider Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong,” Zenz said. “The vast apparatus of high-tech surveillance, forced labor, and cultural eradication is not merely a domestic atrocity. It is a laboratory for a scalable model of total social control. This model underpins its efforts to reshape global norms, export surveillance technology, and execute transnational repression against critics abroad. Similarly, Russia’s systematic dismantling of internal dissent, the poisoning of political opponents, the eradication of independent media, and the crushing of civil society. All of these phenomena were the essential domestic prelude to its full-scale military aggression in Ukraine and its persistent hybrid warfare against Western democracies.”
Said Zenz: “Understanding the human rights violations these autocracies perpetrate is not a niche exercise, but it’s the foundation to understanding the strategic mindset. To successfully counter the efforts to make the world safe for authoritarianism and protect our own freedoms, we must treat the internal conduct as a core national security imperative.”
The director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations, Rush Doshi, who served on the National Security Council staff from 2021 to 2024, said that the Chinese Communist Party combines Chinese nationalism and Leninism. “If you look at the Chinese Communist Party, it’s of course a Leninist party. It penetrates every level of society. It penetrates every level of the state with a dual architecture to make sure that the politically loyal always have their thumb on the key institutions across the country,” he said. “If you are a nationalist political party with a Leninist DNA focused on the achievement and execution of power, the most important variable for you in foreign policy is …the relative power gap between you and the most powerful state, which is the United States.”
Doshi said President Xi is using a phrase, “great changes unseen in a century.” For China, that means, “this is the moment to seize the mantle of global leadership.” Dochi said that militarily that means “Chinese global bases around the world.” along with “a military that has capabilities that exceed the US capabilities, not just in Asia, but globally.”
“My first few weeks at the NSC, I remember we had to push back on China pursuing a military base in Argentina in the Western Hemisphere. But that’s not the only place they’re looking—the Mediterranean, the coast of Africa, the Middle East,” Doshi said.
“Economically, it means a China that can dominate global supply chains,” Doshi said.
The chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Rep. John Moolenaar of Michigan, explained in a video message sent to the meeting, “that’s the vision for communism, not to allow religious liberty, but actually to replace faith with trust in the Chinese Communist Party.”
A former senator and former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, Sam Brownback, said: “For China religious freedom is an existential threat. … For us, it’s a foundational principle. … we should stand up against what China is doing.”
“The real carpetbagger in China is communism,” Brownback said, suggesting, “Bring a group of people that have been persecuted for their faith into the White House and have President Trump meet with them and just have them tell their stories.”
Said Brownback, “I want to quote Ronald Reagan. ‘We win, they lose.’ I think we have to be very clear these are competing systems that are diametrically opposed to each other. We were hoping for years that China was going to evolve into an open democratic capitalistic system. We were, I was. It didn’t happen.”
“The greatest threat to freedom in the world comes from the Chinese Communist Party,” said Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a former chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
The senior director of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Craig Singleton, said, “President Trump has been described as transactional, but one thing that he is not is an isolationist. He is an aggressive internationalist. We don’t seem to be withdrawing from the world. We seem to be competing in almost every domain that’s out there.”
The regional director for East Asia and Pacific of the International Republican Institute, Adam King, predicted China’s ultimate downfall.
“These things, they just can’t ever last forever. I just I am one of those people who says no, there’s no way that China can either develop economically to the level of a place like Taiwan and remain authoritarian or they will fail to develop economically like Taiwan and that will cause the authoritarian system problems. So I just think at some point something will have to break. But maybe I’m just a naive optimist.”
I wasn’t at the event but I caught a lot of it streaming online, enough to wish I had been there in person. It’s odd that it hasn’t gotten more press coverage. A lot of the big media companies have business with Communist China. Particularly inspiring was the closing keynote from the president and CEO of the National Endowment for Democracy, Damon Wilson.
“I want to focus less on the repression… I want to focus more on the resilience of the human spirit within China… journalists preserving the truth, …survivors of forced labor, the religious leaders keeping faith alive underground,” he said. “Their courage reminds me of what I’ve seen in other closed societies…Every authoritarian system looked unshakable until suddenly it’s not. What cracks it open isn’t the power from the outside, it’s the courage within.”
He predicted: “the day will come when the Chinese people can speak freely, worship freely, and determine their own future.”
Harvard’s 17 outside lawyers want fees secret until after fundraising season ends: In the “you can’t make it up” department, Harvard’s 17 outside lawyers in its federal case against the Department of Health and Human Services have asked Judge Allison Burroughs for a delay in filing any motion for attorney’s fees and costs in the case until after the year-end fundraising season for Harvard is over.
An unopposed motion filed today in the case says, “This Court entered final judgment on October 20, 2025. See ECF 247. Pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(d)(2)(B), any motion for attorney’s fees ‘must … be filed no later than 14 days after the entry of judgment’ unless “a statute or a court order provides otherwise.” The federal government hasn’t yet filed a notice of appeal in the case.
With 17 lawyers including William Burck of Quinn Emanuel (who does not come cheap). Robert Hur of King and Spalding, six lawyers from Harvard’s longtime law firm Ropes and Gray, and nine lawyers from the smaller firm Lehotsky Keller Cohn LLP, it’s likely to be a multimillion-dollar bill. And the $1,000-plus hourly fees—at a time when Harvard’s lawyers were publicly pleading that life-saving cancer research was being halted for lack of funding—might be embarrassing, or at least somewhat ironic. Especially with the federal government shut down and some food stamp recipients and government workers going unpaid, the idea of Harvard demanding that the government fork over millions of dollars to pay fees and expenses for its fancy lawyers might strike some as not exactly timely. This way, Harvard can do its year-end fundraising from alumni donors before a lot of press headlines about how much William Burck gets paid an hour. One can argue it was money well spent, but that’s a weaker argument until and unless Harvard also prevails at the appellate level.
Meanwhile, the full-employment-for-high-priced lawyers approach to Harvard antisemitism defense work extends to the university’s defense against Yoav Segev. Segev is the former Harvard Business School student who was attacked by anti-Israel protesters on the business school campus in what became a local criminal case (it was dismissed after the assailants committed court-assigned anger management classes and community service). In that case Harvard is represented by two lawyers from King and Spalding and also by Felicia Ellsworth and Jacob Tuttle Newman of WilmerHale.
If WilmerHale sounds familiar, it should. It lost the Harvard affirmative action in admissions case at the Supreme Court while racking up tens of millions in fees, for which Harvard was on the hook after its lawyers failed to provide timely notice to its insurance company, which would have been responsible for paying the bills. The same firm also prepped both Penn and Harvard for the disastrous congressional hearing before Chairman Virginia Foxx and Rep. Elise Stefanik. Ellsworth sat in the front row at that hearing, next to current Harvard president, then-provost, Alan Garber, and behind Claudine Gay. A WilmerHale partner, William Lee, was the senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, and another two partners, Seth Waxman and Jamie Gorelick, were members of the Harvard Board of Overseers.
Perhaps some powers that be at Harvard are secretly hoping Ellsworth will lose the case against Segev, too. There’s certainly a comedic element to her argument, in an October 27, 2025, memo in the Segev case, that Harvard’s University-Wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities describing the place as “ideally characterized by free expression, free inquiry, intellectual honesty, respect for the dignity of others, and openness to constructive change” is merely a “generalized, aspirational statement” that does not qualify as a “specific contractual promise.” Maybe Harvard, as a truth in advertising should slap that disclosure on all of its tuition bills and admissions promotion material, along with testimony from Segev about his experience.
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