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.