Chapter 24: Xi Jinping Builds a Red Empire, America Awakens, 2013–2021 (Part I)

Communism: Promise and Practice (1973), commonly known as The Black Book of Communism, meticulously documents the shocking disparity between the Soviet Union’s official propaganda of policy equality and economic fairness and the grim reality, as well as the emergence of a new ruling class in the Soviet Union and other communist countries—a class that grew powerful by exploiting the labor and sacrifices of the rest of society. During Stalin’s rule, political persecution in the Soviet Union included not only the victims of the Great Purge, but also peasants executed after being labeled “kulaks” by state authorities; the forced labor camp system known as the Gulag; the deportation of ethnic minorities; and the Ukrainian famine (1932–1934), in which millions were starved to death. The Black Book of Communism also provides detailed accounts of China’s Great Leap Forward and the bloody massacres carried out by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.

The book’s author, Rudolph Rummel, estimated that 20 million Soviet citizens died as a result of Stalin’s persecutions, and that 65 million Chinese died under Mao Zedong. He further estimated that 9.3 million people were killed under communist rule in other countries: 2 million in North Korea, 2 million in Cambodia, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan, 1.7 million in Vietnam, 1 million in Eastern Europe, and 150,000 in Latin America. On January 25, 2006, the Council of Europe, in a resolution condemning the crimes of communist regimes, cited the authors of The Black Book of Communism and their figure of 94 million deaths. Nearly one hundred million people perished under communist movements. Communism has inflicted immense suffering on humanity—its crimes are monstrous and unforgivable.

In 1983, during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan forcefully condemned the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire,” pointing out that for many years it had deliberately murdered and abused its people, slaughtering millions. He bluntly stated that communism represented a tragic and grotesque chapter in human history.

Reagan declared that this chapter was nearing its end and predicted that the Soviet communist regime would inevitably collapse. A few years after Reagan denounced the “Evil Empire,” the Soviet empire indeed disintegrated. Yet totalitarian evil did not disappear. In recent years in particular, it has erupted malignantly in China. The regime has brutally suppressed its own people, maintaining a force of more than one million armed police to deal with over 200,000 mass protest incidents each year. Spending on “stability maintenance” exceeds even military defense expenditures. More than one hundred Tibetans have died through self-immolation in protest. Uyghurs in Xinjiang have been subjected to mass detention and repression. Christians have been forced underground and continue to face persecution. Hundreds of rights-defense lawyers have been arrested and imprisoned. International Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo was jailed to death. Xi Jinping has explicitly ordered that no one may “recklessly criticize the central authorities,” while cyber police erase all dissent online.

Xi Jinping has shown no concern for the hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens struggling at the poverty line, or for impoverished schoolchildren hunched over broken desks trying to study. Instead, he has poured hundreds of billions of dollars—accumulated through the blood and sweat of three generations—abroad to construct his Belt and Road “red empire” and pursue his dream of becoming a global emperor. He has militarized the South China Sea, expanded armaments, and threatened international sea lanes and the security of neighboring countries. China has massively expanded its cyber forces to steal U.S. technological intelligence and dispatched spies to infiltrate Western nations, drawing repeated international condemnation.

In 2019, renowned investor George Soros publicly accused Xi Jinping—face to face with Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan in Switzerland—of being the most dangerous enemy of open societies. Soros warned that the U.S.–China Cold War was moving toward a hot war. He condemned China’s use of facial recognition technology to control 1.4 billion people and argued that the United States should not reach a trade agreement with China but should continue the struggle. Soros is a remarkable figure, born in Hungary and personally scarred by the brutality of Stalinist totalitarianism.

The United States showed no mercy in its Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union, meeting it head-on at every turn. Its attitude toward China, however, was complicated by sympathy for a nation that had once been oppressed. The CCP exploited this American weakness and mastered the art of deception to perfection. In 2015, American scholar Michael Pillsbury published The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower. Drawing on forty years of engagement with the CCP, Pillsbury concluded that since 1949 Mao Zedong had harbored ambitions of global dominance. To achieve this, Mao sought first to obtain American assistance to strengthen China’s economy, technology, and military while concealing his true intentions.

Pillsbury identified five major misconceptions the United States held about China.
First, the mistaken belief that engagement would lead to cooperation, when in reality the CCP consistently worked against the United States.
Second, the belief that engagement would push China toward democracy, which proved to be an illusion—authoritarianism could foster economic growth while becoming even more entrenched.
Third, the belief that China was a fragile flower, fearing that strong U.S. pressure would cause it to collapse into chaos.
Fourth, the belief that the CCP aspired to become like the United States, when in fact its thinking was fundamentally different, and it took pride in manipulating Americans through deception.
Fifth, the belief that hardliners within the CCP would never gain dominance, when in reality they became the mainstream voice.

Meanwhile, segments of the American business community, driven by economic interests and fearful of losing access to the Chinese market, avoided confronting reality. Misjudgments about the CCP amounted to raising a tiger only to be bitten later, turning China into a strategic adversary of the United States. Painful lessons awakened policymakers, leading to a strategic shift toward decoupling and containment. From 2015 onward, American political and intellectual circles underwent a 180-degree change in their perception of China. That year, U.S. think tanks reached a consensus: China is America’s long-term strategic rival.

Michael Collins, a former CIA official responsible for East Asia affairs, once observed that the CCP traditionally employed a low-profile, “duck paddling underwater” approach to influence and undermine the United States—subtle and difficult to detect, unlike the overt confrontation of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. However, under Xi Jinping, this covert approach has been openly abandoned.

The year 2015 marked a turning point in U.S.–China relations. That year, David Shambaugh, a heavyweight China expert at George Washington University, published an article in The Wall Street Journal titled “The Coming Chinese Crackup.” He declared that CCP rule in China had entered its “endgame.” No one could predict exactly when the CCP would collapse, “but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are watching its final act.” China, he argued, was unlikely to experience a “peaceful collapse.” Once the CCP fell, the process would be “long, complex, and violent.” Shambaugh, previously known for offering relatively “positive interpretations” of China’s system and often classified as a moderate China scholar, began issuing sharp critiques—becoming a bellwether of shifting academic sentiment in the United States.

The year 2015 would become the “first year of anti-China awakening” in U.S. think tanks. Scholar Wu Jusheng noted that this shift was driven by two major historical events in the preceding year. The first was the Crimean War. In early 2014, Russia launched an invasion to seize Crimea from Ukraine, overturning the international order established under U.S. leadership after World War II and violating the Budapest Memorandum, under which the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia had guaranteed Ukraine’s security in exchange for nuclear disarmament. Europe and the United States imposed strong sanctions on Russia, leading to a collapse of the ruble, a sharp reduction in dollar reserves, and a near fiscal crisis. At this critical moment, China openly supported Russia, providing massive assistance that enabled it to weather the storm. This amounted to a formal declaration that China stood with Russia in its strategic confrontation with the West—a fundamental shift in China’s strategic orientation.

The second event was China’s island-building campaign in the South China Sea. In a short period, China completed massive land reclamation projects on reefs and islands and declared 12-nautical-mile territorial waters. The United States relies on the South China Sea to maintain its Pacific dominance; China used artificial islands to signal its challenge to U.S. maritime supremacy. These two events decisively shaped the future trajectory of U.S.–China relations. From that point forward, the relationship could never return to what it once was.