The Bewildering Amnesia of America’s Elite: Bradley Thayer

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] In this episode, Bradley Thayer exposes the workings of the Chinese regime’s political and ideological warfare. He’s the director of China policy at the Center for Security Policy and author of “Understanding the China Threat.”

What makes TikTok a particularly potent weapon? And how should the United States approach the Chinese regime?

*Big thanks to our sponsor Patriot Gold Group! Check them out here: http://www.patriotgoldgroup.com/p/epoch

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Dr. Bradley Thayer, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Dr. Bradley Thayer:
It’s my pleasure to join you.

Mr. Jekielek:
Over the last few years, we have been exposed to a lot of very good information. The West is not really behaving in a way that would suggest there’s a serious threat from communism today. What do you think about that?

Dr. Thayer:
I agree with you, we’re not behaving in the right way. We’re not treating the Chinese Communist Party as the enemy of Western civilization, of governments around the world, and also of people within China and around the world. We’re not treating them as the enemy. Instead, we are attempting to sustain the engagement school.

We are attempting to ensure that by trade with them, by investment in the Chinese Communist Party, by making them stronger, and by allowing them to remain in power, that we will be able to change their behavior and they will become more benign, rather than the tyrannical government that they are.

It’s a deep problem. It has penetrated the Pentagon, the intelligence community, every facet of the U.S. government, Congress, our media, universities, business communities, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley. It’s a profound problem and it must change. The survival of the United States depends on recognizing that the CCP is the enemy of the United States, of American values, and of American principles. It must be seen as such.

Mr. Jekielek:
You made the point of distinguishing between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people. Perhaps one of the most powerful pieces of CCP [Chinese Communist Party] propaganda is to conflate itself with the Chinese people. It always says that you’re going to hurt the feelings of the Chinese people if you do X or Y. We’ve internalized that to some extent. Certainly, the Chinese people abroad have internalized it. In your book, you talk about how the Chinese people aren’t necessarily going to go along with the CCP. What portion of the population can delineate itself against the CCP?

Dr. Thayer:
The party says it has about 96 million members, and let’s assume that is true. Let’s assume that a big chunk of those 96 million are there just because they have to be for career reasons. Perhaps half of those individuals are diehards. But sadly, to run a tyranny, you only need a small number of individuals who are willing to act ruthlessly to impose their vision and their tyranny on the society. Your point is an excellent one. The CCP does its utmost to link itself to the Chinese people, but also to the greatness of Chinese civilization, which of course is incoherent.

The CCP is a communist government. It is a Leninist government, and Leninism has nothing to do with China or Chinese civilization. The CCP is a Western import, and it should be seen as such. It’s incoherent in terms of Chinese history, and it was able to come to power because of Joseph Stalin and the Communist International.

It stayed in power as a result of the tyranny of Mao and subsequent leaders. When we look at that, we need to understand that this is a Western artifact imposed and holding back the greatness of Chinese civilization and the Chinese people. We need to recognize that they’re not allowing voting as well.

Essentially, they’re not allowing any type of feedback in terms of how popular they are, and how much support they actually possess among the Chinese people. When you look at that and in particular look at the example of Taiwan, it’s quite clear that the Chinese people would be far better off without the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. Jekielek:
Looking at the last three or four years in this country and in the West, I understand the power of propaganda at a deeper level. In these communist societies, especially communist China, the level of propaganda and deliberate indoctrination is incredibly high, and some people are susceptible to that. How prominent do you think this is in Chinese people’s thinking, based on what you know? Your co-author has deep insight into the Chinese population. How many people are actually free of that ideology in some way?

Dr. Thayer:
The CCP is well aware of the importance of ideology and indoctrination, but it also has to be forced upon the Chinese people, because it is incoherent to the Chinese circumstance and the Chinese condition. It’s also because of the tools that they use. One of our interviewees said that because of the high technology and the fact that it is a surveillance superpower, the CCP has incredible tools to surveil you.

This means that it was this high technology that in essence saved the CCP. Your social credit score and the fact that they monitor you constantly puts you in a state of perpetual fear. You’re living in that panopticon that the philosopher Foucault identified. You are policing yourself because you are always monitored, so that has a very powerful effect.

You’re not going along with it for ideological reasons. You’re mouthing the terminology in the way that Orwell identified, or that we are familiar with due to the Soviet experience and Soviet tyranny. You’re going through the motions, but you do not really believe it. You’re being educated in that way, but you do not really believe it. That’s a profound vulnerability of the party that could be very usefully exploited by the diaspora and others as well.

Advanced technology, AI, and the fact that they can surveil you 24/7 and are not shy about using their tools against your family members gives them very powerful mechanisms to stay in power. In the book, we suggest a critical factor for freeing the Chinese people from the tyranny of the CCP is to find a way to permanently break the Great Firewall, to be able to ensure that the Chinese people are able to liberate themselves from the surveillance state and access the global internet.

Mr. Jekielek:
Some people are saying China under the Chinese Communist Party is just a competitor. It’s not an enemy. You say it’s the number one enemy that seeks to kill us. What are the most powerful, compelling pieces of evidence you have of this?

Dr. Thayer:
The most powerful piece of evidence is communist thought. We need to understand the role of the West and the role of the United States in communist thought from Lenin, through Stalin, to Mao, to today. Xi Jinping is a communist, and he takes that ideology very seriously. This is a ruler who takes communist ideas very seriously.

As we document in the book, he sees the world through that lens. It has shaped him from the time he was a young man, and he has both suffered and profited from Mao’s tyranny up until today. For communism, the West is the barrier that needs to be destroyed. If the United States in particular were eliminated, the PRC [People’s Republic of China] would be able to get what it wants from the rest of the world. It is very important to understand communist thought.

What he says is related to that, if you simply look at what is coming out of Xi Jinping’s mouth. He issued the declaration of a people’s war against the United States in 2019, asking the Chinese people to steel themselves for a period of war and great suffering, and saying that difficult times are coming, which has only been reinforced since then. That would be fine if China were weak. Lots of folks might hate the United States, but if they don’t have the power, that’s a separate issue. China has the power, because from 1990 it has grown from about 1.6 percent of world gross domestic product pre-Covid, to about 19 percent of world gross domestic product today.

We’ve seen that wealth translate into military power, diplomatic might, the Belt and Road Initiative, increasing technology, space exploration, ideological warfare, and political warfare employed very effectively against the West and other states in international politics. Here’s a group that is telling you it wants to kill you. You are the barrier. They are going to supplant you, undermine you, and replace you. The leader himself is saying that time and time again, and they have the muscle to do that if the United States does not respond.

Mr. Jekielek:
There was a recent piece that you published in The Epoch Times talking about TikTok. You say TikTok plays the role that the workers groups did in Tsarist Russia that were used by the Bolsheviks as the centers of thuggery to enact the revolution. Please tell me about that.

Dr. Thayer:
The Chinese Communist Party is a student of communist thought and of communist history, and the Soviets play a very important role in communist history. A Soviet was created by the Tsar in the wake of the 1905 revolution. A Soviet was a working man’s council. We can think of them as a union where there’s an economic role. There’s also a role in civil society, and there’s a political role.

The Tsar welcomed them. We saw them as a sign of progress. Now, the Russians were getting unions, and that was a sign of becoming increasingly Western and increasingly modern. The Bolsheviks recognized, as well as did other communist groups and socialist groups, that this was a gift. They could be radicalized and turned against the Tsar’s government. In fact, they were very quickly radicalized and turned against the Tsar. That played a key role in the October 1917 revolution.

In this sense, what is a Soviet? It is something that you welcome and see as a sign of progress and even innocuous like TikTok, which is also welcomed. At least 75 million Americans have downloaded it, and it is seen as something which is innocuous, but of course, it’s there to undermine you. It’s a tool to be used against you by the CCP. I suggest in the piece that we need to see it as such.

What you have done is just given the Communist Party of China the ability to access you, the ability to influence you in elections, and the ability to influence your political behavior, your beliefs, and how you see the rest of the world. But we have to recognize that we need to do that same thing to the PRC. We need to do that same thing to the Chinese Communist Party. We need to find a technological TikTok in reverse, to do that against the CCP. We need to find a social TikTok in reverse like the original Soviets were, something that they would welcome and that would be seen as benign, but that could then be used to undermine the CCP.

Mr. Jekielek:
They’re becoming more and more isolationist. We talk about decoupling, but actually the CCP under Xi Jinping is decoupling on its own terms and decoupling from the things that are not beneficial to it. Perhaps because of this paranoia that you just talked about, they’re not ready to take on any Soviets as you describe them. In fact, they’re expecting them, because that’s exactly what they would do.

Dr. Thayer:
Indeed. They are artful when it comes to political warfare, but there are avenues into their society and culture. There are avenues that the West provides in terms of technology or finance that do give us that ability by working with the diaspora, working with individuals within Chinese society, or working with groups that rightfully tout the greatness of Chinese civilization in religious thought, philosophy, aesthetics and so many other areas. There are actually many avenues into their society that might be usefully employed to show that the CCP is a Western artifact and has nothing to do with Chinese history. It is an illegitimate government and should be seen as such.

Mr. Jekielek:
The folks that govern this country need to believe that, as opposed to admiring the CCP for its great efficiency, or for its ability to clamp down on potentially problematic elements like the Muslims in Xinjiang. The CCP has created a totalitarian reality where any minority views can be snuffed out. I’m not so convinced that everything you described is something that people in the American embassy in Beijing, doling out whatever new technologies the U.S. government has developed daily, are thinking. They are not thinking that way.

Dr. Thayer:
I don’t believe that they are thinking that way either, and it’s a profound problem. We started this discussion with the observation that we don’t see them as the enemy. The U.S. government may say certain things and publish certain documents by the Pentagon or certain commissions that call attention to this, but the U.S. government is not acting that way, and neither is U.S. society treating them as the enemy. This gets to the fundamental problem that we do not see them as the enemy.

You are correct to suggest that it’s because they are admired. The CCP is admired by at least a segment of the American elite. Perhaps some of the 400 elites who were at that dinner admire the CCP for its efficiency, as Bill Gates has said. It doesn’t have union problems, and that would be another reason why the 400 elites would look upon it admiringly.

These individuals do not understand communism and they do not understand the nature of the threat. In one sense, why should they? They have never been challenged to understand it. The government has never challenged them or forced them to act like Americans. Instead, they act like CEO’s trying to maximize return to shareholders. Until we see them identify the enemy as such and act accordingly, we’re going to have that profound disconnect which hurts us, hobbles us, and fetters us. We’re not able to mobilize and direct ourselves at a time when the CCP faces tremendous vulnerability.

Mr. Jekielek:
You offer a whole suite of very thoughtful solutions. A lot of them would require a certain understanding beforehand. Some portion of America fundamentally believes in American values, believes in the Constitution, and believes that America with all its myriad problems today is fundamentally good. It’s a system that deserves to live on, and it’s actually a beacon of hope in the world. It’s the shining city on the hill.

Unfortunately, a lot of our institutions of education have been captured by people who think differently and perhaps are happy to have a “managed decline.” They may even feel that the CCP’s system is actually better and that we should rule the world with their system because it’s so great.

Dr. Thayer:
Absolutely. Empirically, we can contrast the number of allies the CCP has vs. the number of allies the U.S. has. The CCP’s existence is defined by exploitation of people and the environment. It doesn’t have friends in international politics. It buys Pakistan, Cambodia, North Korea, and Russia. But the United States has about eighty-four allies.

The United States is an open society which has been able to transform itself. It went through a civil rights movement and a women’s rights movement. It has remade itself into a society that is far more equitable, far more democratic, and far more in accord with universal political principles that resonate around the world. Contrast that to the tyranny of the CCP—nobody is trying to get into China. Everybody is trying to get into the United States by the tens of millions, and it would be hundreds of millions if they could.

People are trying to flee communist China. Again, people vote with their feet, as [inaudible] identified. Indeed, they do vote with their feet. Where are they going? The U.S. is a far better ally. It treats its partners and its allies in a far more equitable way than the ruthless exploitation of communist China.

Let’s look at that empirically and let’s size it up. We can see that the United States, objectively and ideologically, has universal values for men, for women, for the rights of sexual minorities, and so many other groups are treated far better in the United States. The art, the scientific approach, and the intellectual thought of Western civilization, which the United States is part of, has contributed to its greatness. That is in direct contrast to the society that the Chinese Communist Party has created.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is so obvious, but this is the power of political warfare, correct?

Dr. Thayer:
It is. The great successes of the United States and of the West in general, can be denigrated, can be minimized, or they can essentially not be addressed at all. What we need to have in our society is that Cromwellian approach, warts and all. Yes, you can pay attention to the mistakes that we’ve made, but if you look at the portrait in general, they’re insignificant in contrast to what has been provided by the international order that the United States and Great Britain created in the wake of World War II. They successfully fought a Cold War and then seemed to have lost their way after the defeat of the Soviet Union. Let us hope that once again we can find the path to defeat of the Communist Party of China.

They are artful at political warfare. They’re very good at working with individuals within the United States to introduce intellectual amnesia among our elite. Perversely, the American elite think that the dictatorship of Xi Jinping is something to be emulated. The positive question of the 21st century is going to be this issue. It’s going to be whether tyranny wins. Is China able to make its mark and sustain it on the rest of the world, or is freedom, as evinced by the American system and American power, going to win the day? As we’ve suggested, it’s not clear what the answer to that question is.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s also not clear because the West itself is toying with these ideologies. In your book, you talk about what the Chinese Communist Party world order would look like. We already can see what that would look like by how they operate. Please tell me about that.

Dr. Thayer:
We can see it, and it’s defined by the self-interest of the Chinese Communist Party. While being a part of the Western order, they’re also making their own international institutions. Those are approaches which heavily favor the PRC’s interest, like exploitation in Pakistan, extraction of oil energy and resources from Sudan, or buying political influence in the Solomon Islands and so many other places. People who come to know the CCP don’t like it. In 2006, Guy Scott, a Zambian politician, said in an interview with the Guardian, “We’ve had bad people before. The whites were bad, the Indians were worse, but the Chinese are the worst of all in terms of the raw exploitation of Zambia.” His encounter with the CCP was not a pleasant one.

Now, to a degree, the CCP offsets that by buying. They offset that by buying local elites and rewarding local elites. But people of goodwill around the world can see this. They can see that this is not a society which is in any way egalitarian, or in any way equitable. You could look at the experience of Africans in China to see this. When Chinese entities travel in Africa or work in Africa, the experience is almost without exception, an unhappy one.

The party has a very strong and clear hierarchy. People who have darker complexions are far lower down in that party hierarchy. Again, that does not receive the attention that it should. Likewise, there are issues of women’s rights. We could list very important issues that affect people around the world, and we could see that the People’s Republic of China is found wanting in all of those categories.

Mr. Jekielek:
You repeatedly highlight that if you do not understand the nature of communism, you will not understand this CCP threat. Please explain that.

Dr. Thayer:
The Chinese Communist Party is a threat for three different levels of analysis or types of explanations. First, Xi Jinping is a threat. We can think of it as the police investigating a car crash. They look at the driver. If the driver is okay, they look at the car. If the car is okay, they look at the road conditions. Looking at the driver, Xi Jinping, we see great danger.

Here’s an individual who is paranoid and is leading the CCP in a very dangerous direction, which is going to have immediate negative consequences for the rest of the world; Taiwan, Japan, and U.S. allies around the world. The driver, Xi Jinping, is a major problem.

Secondly, look at the car. The car is the Chinese Communist Party, a Soviet knockoff. It’s a danger and a threat to everything on the road; pedestrians, dogs, cats, other cars, and other vehicles. It is a very dangerous vehicle, and its driver is going to be hamstrung and hindered by the car he is driving.

That ideology of communism is the essence of that automobile. It’s caused car crashes everywhere it has been tried. Anybody who has driven it has been wrecked, whether it was the Soviets or North Korea. We can go around the world, and it has always failed. It has always been a disaster.

But then there are also the road conditions. If the road condition is Interstate 80 in Iowa; flat, straight, and quite easy to drive, that’s one thing. But if you’re dealing with hairpin curves in fog or in whiteout conditions, those are very different road conditions.

Part of the problem that we face is that young people and so many Americans think that international politics is only driving on Interstate 80 in Iowa, and that it’s always easy. The car is a great car, and the drivers are quite good. They don’t understand that road conditions can be dire and will easily change and will cause disasters.

When we’re looking at this issue, we can say there is profound trouble that we are facing, and the problem is only going to get worse. We have major problems not understanding the car. Xi Jinping could die today or he could die tomorrow, but the car is still going to determine a lot of the driver’s behavior and make the driver a very dangerous one.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is it about communism that makes it fail catastrophically every time it is attempted?

Dr. Thayer:
Because it’s the negation of humanity. It’s the negation of the reality that people see. It’s absolute control over others, and people chafe at that type of system. It’s also dangerous because it seems appealing in terms of the way it was envisioned. To many of its adherents, it seems to lead you to a better world. It also seems to be scientific, which attracts a lot of intellectuals.

You’re on a path that can study society and can move society in a certain direction. Yes, you’re going to break eggs, but you’re going to get an omelet at the end of the day. Of course, the omelet never shows up. But there are so many tens of millions, hundreds of millions of broken eggs, individuals who have been killed in tremendous human rights abuses without parallel.

Communism is an anti-humanitarian ideology. It suppresses human freedom. It does not permit human freedom. Because it is tyrannical and negates the human spirit, it will fail wherever it is tried. It can last longer if it’s subsidized. If Wall Street will invest in it, then it will last longer. But if it is cut off, then it will collapse sooner.

Mr. Jekielek:
As you’re talking, I’m thinking about the First Amendment. We’ve been having a lot of discussions in America about the value of free speech. With the First Amendment, you have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press. Communism in general is antithetical to all of these things and it hates them. It definitely hates the Second Amendment.

Dr. Thayer:
It does indeed. It hates any aspect of liberty. Any aspect of freedom, it seeks to destroy. It seeks absolute control and absolute tyranny over anyone operating within that system. Despite its intellectual appeal to so many over so many decades, it is the negation of every liberty that Americans hold dear. It is the negation of the political culture that we have created in the United States, which is undergoing a unique challenge.

Communism is not something which exists only in China. It’s also present in the U.S. The U.S. is presently undergoing a tremendous ideological upheaval between political liberalism, the traditional ideology of the United States vs. progressivism, which is a type of communist thought.

The struggle between the CCP and the United States takes place in the international realm to be sure. But there is also a domestic aspect as well, where individuals here in the United States sympathetic to communism are free to have their political beliefs and express them. But they also recognize, as Lenin observed, that they are useful idiots. They’re serving an odious and tyrannical power. If Beijing wins and is able to set the rules, norms, principles, and behavior of the 21st century, those are the individuals that will rule the day. Of course, that will be cold comfort, and the individuals here will then recognize their folly.

Mr. Jekielek:
Dr. Thayer, this has been a fascinating discussion. Any final thoughts as we finish?

Dr. Thayer:
A final thought is that we’re going to win. Despite the problems that we have, there is enough strength in American society, the values that we possess, and the ideology that we hold. As we stress in the book, this is an ideological struggle. Our ideology is infinitely better and far superior to the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party. That serves to explain why we need to fight, why we should fight, and why we will win. We need to have the confidence to recognize that if we steel ourselves, if we recognize the nature of the threat and its tremendous vulnerabilities and exploit those vulnerabilities, we can defeat them just as we defeated the Soviet Union.

Mr. Jekielek:
Dr. Bradley Thayer, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Dr. Thayer:
Thank you. It was my pleasure. Thank you very much indeed.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Dr. Bradley Thayer and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.