Foreword: America’s Awakening

Zhong Wen

For a long time, the United States has been divided between hawks and doves regarding the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As recently as last year, some prominent doves even jointly issued a statement titled “China Is Not the Enemy.” Over the past two years, however, the U.S. has come to recognize the CCP as a strategic adversary. It has acknowledged its past misjudgments and is beginning to decouple from the CCP.

When we talk about decoupling, it is, of course, decoupling from the CCP, not from the Chinese people. Yet the CCP controls China’s economy, making economic decoupling extremely difficult. Moreover, the United States lacks legislative authority to enforce a full decoupling. Complete separation is nearly impossible, and trade and people-to-people exchanges cannot be entirely severed.

In the strategic struggle against the CCP, trade decoupling is largely symbolic; the key battleground is political and ideological. Political struggle requires first and foremost the ability to distinguish friend from foe. For decades, America’s greatest error in dealing with the CCP has been treating an enemy as a friend. Mao Zedong, like Stalin, was a ruthless communist demon. Yet the CCP excelled at disguise, cloaking itself in appealing appearances to deceive Americans, beginning in the 1930s when Mao misled journalist Edgar Snow, who then deceived President Roosevelt. During the war against Japan and afterward, Mao continued to deceive Roosevelt and Truman’s envoys, causing the U.S. to trust the CCP more than its ally Chiang Kai-shek.

During World War II, Roosevelt even allied with Stalin, supplying a struggling Soviet Union with aid. By enabling Stalin’s totalitarian expansion under the guise of the “socialist camp,” communism spread catastrophically, wreaking havoc globally. This represents the gravest strategic error in America’s century-long struggle against communism—a lesson of utmost severity. U.S. aid revived the Soviet Union, which, under the banner of the Comintern, supported Mao in the East, inflicting immense disaster on the Chinese nation.

These historical lessons are painfully clear. President Nixon ignored Roosevelt’s warnings; in 1972 he recognized Mao as a friend, despite no diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China. He personally flew to Beijing, meeting Mao in his bedroom—a so-called “ice-breaking” gesture and part of the “triangular diplomacy” to counter the Soviet Union. At that time, Stalin had died, and Mao remained a monstrous figure of the remaining communist evil. Nixon’s handshake opened the path for formal U.S.-China relations in 1979 and laid the foundation for later trade ties.

After Mao’s death in 1976, China’s economy was nearly collapsed. Deng Xiaoping attacked Vietnam, offering the U.S. a “pledge of allegiance,” and began “reform and opening,” deceiving the United States with utilitarian politics. The CCP was resurrected economically but not politically. Its strategy—“Four Persistences” and “keeping the sword sheathed”—deceptively restrained potential conflict until 1989, when the CCP violently suppressed the democracy movement, sending hundreds of tanks and 100,000 troops to Tiananmen Square, killing over a thousand. President George H.W. Bush failed to support the movement or condemn the massacre, fearing to offend Deng Xiaoping.

In 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Red Empire, many assumed communism was finished. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History (1992) declared the triumph of democratic governance worldwide, ignoring the continuing existence of the CCP. The CCP, having long split from the Soviet Union, refused to follow Moscow’s path of reform, adhering to rigid communist orthodoxy, rejecting constitutional democracy, and returning China to a Maoist-style path. Its ruling faction seized reform-era wealth, built aircraft carriers, expanded territory through artificial islands, threatened Taiwan militarily, and crushed Hong Kong’s freedoms under the National Security Law. By 2021, the CCP is once again poised against global civilized nations.

Many American scholars failed to recognize this for decades; some still have not. The CCP remains the world’s greatest threat. Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996) misguidedly directed U.S. attention toward conflicts with Islamic and Eastern civilizations while leaving communism aside. The real conflict is not civilization against civilization but civilization against barbarism—totalitarian communism versus constitutional democracy. Clinton naively believed in the 2000s that aiding China’s economic rise would lead to political liberalization, facilitating entry into the WTO and strengthening the CCP instead.

The CCP excels at deception, operating through two main organs: the Organization Department, which mobilizes violence, and the Propaganda Department, which crafts pleasing narratives to indoctrinate both domestically and abroad. Each year, the CCP spends tens of billions of dollars on internal brainwashing and external propaganda. Most overseas Chinese-language media in Europe and the U.S. have been co-opted to sing the CCP’s praises, while U.S. influence in China is almost nonexistent. As Nixon warned: “If you lose the ideological struggle, all weapons, treaties, trade, aid, and cultural links are meaningless.” Yet Nixon and his successors neglected ideology, collaborating with Mao. China became the world’s second-largest economy and directed its power against the U.S.

Domestically, the CCP suppresses and manipulates its people; internationally, it continues to infiltrate and expand its malign influence, treating the U.S. as its chief global adversary. By 2012, Xi Jinping openly revealed the CCP’s true antagonism toward America. Reflecting on the decades of misjudgment, it is only since 2018 that U.S. leaders have begun to openly acknowledge past errors. America was deceived for decades; its awakening is underway, but it remains incomplete.

To defeat communism, the U.S. must wage a sustained and profound ideological struggle. This requires fully exposing the crimes of Mao Zedong, the deity of CCP ideology—not merely Marxist theory, but specifically Mao Zedong Thought. Only by unveiling Mao’s atrocities can the ideological foundation of the CCP be shattered, leaving successors disoriented and powerless.

Mao’s crimes include:

1930s massacres in Jiangxi (100,000 victims), brutal purges during the Yan’an Rectification Movement, and fabrication of anti-Japanese pretenses to harm Nationalist forces;

Participation in the Korean War supporting the Kim regime against UN forces;

Systematic purges of intellectuals and elites (“Anti-Rightist Campaign”), murdering hundreds of thousands;

Publicly declaring at the 1957 Moscow International Communist Congress willingness to kill half the world for global revolution;

The Great Leap Forward (1958–61), causing famine and 45 million deaths;

The Cultural Revolution (1966–76), resulting in tens of millions of deaths.

I personally experienced the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In 1952, my hometown in Foshan, Guabu Village, was leveled for airport construction. Villagers received only 300 yuan per household; thousands protested, but the PLA sent a company of 100+ soldiers to suppress them. Thousands were displaced overnight, and I became a rootless wanderer.

Few Americans fully understood Mao’s crimes. Only presidents like Wilson, who opposed Soviet communism, and Reagan, who called the USSR an “evil empire,” showed such clarity. Today, the CCP is more malevolent than 1980s Soviet communism. Even Trump’s praise of Xi Jinping reflects ideological deference that undermines the struggle.

From 1900 onward, the U.S. has been the world’s leading power, decisive in global affairs. World War I and II were short-lived victories militarily, yet strategic misjudgments—especially regarding Stalin and the CCP—enabled the spread of communism, causing decades of global catastrophe, compounded by U.S. naivety.

Today, the United States is awakening. Its awakening possesses the transformative force of nuclear fusion—a prerequisite and guarantee for defeating communism.

September 5, 2020