OPINION:
America spent last week obsessing over the midterm elections, celebrating Democratic victories that included several avowed democratic socialists. Across the Atlantic, crowds in France sang “The Internationale,” the revolutionary anthem of world communism.
Amid the excitement, the White House proclamation of Nov. 1 through 7 as Anti-Communism Week — marking the 109th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution — was nearly drowned out.
The irony was striking. As Washington warned about communism’s enduring dangers, revolutionary communist symbolism gained renewed enthusiasm in Western democracies.
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Democratic socialism differs from Leninist communism, and the Democratic Party remains ideologically diverse. Yet the romanticization of communist imagery reveals a troubling historical amnesia.
Nowhere was communism’s human toll more devastating than in China. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward killed tens of millions through a man-made famine, and the Cultural Revolution devastated an entire generation.
More recently, the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship, secrecy and coercive pandemic policies compounded the COVID-19 catastrophe, leading to more than 15 million deaths worldwide. These disasters shared a pathology: Ideological certainty supersedes reality, and CCP infallibility matters more than human life.
The West’s greatest strategic failure, however, has been its persistent misunderstanding of Chinese communism. Generations of American strategists, politicians, academics and business elites have embraced a comforting fiction: Soviet communism was ideologically genuine, while Chinese communism was essentially Chinese nationalism dressed in Marxist-Leninist clothing.
Beijing’s ambitions, they believe, sprang from national humiliation and rejuvenation, not the revolutionary mission of a Leninist party seeking to transform the international order.
This delusion seduced even America’s fiercest anti-communist strategists. They interpreted the Sino-Soviet split as a triumph of Chinese nationalism over communist internationalism, overlooking the ideological struggle at its core.
Mao condemned Soviet leaders as revisionists who betrayed Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy through peaceful coexistence with the capitalist West. Moscow’s reluctance to risk nuclear confrontation with America, in Mao’s eyes, demonstrated revolutionary cowardice.
The Cultural Revolution was driven substantially by Mao’s determination to prevent China from becoming another supposedly revisionist, soft-on-America Soviet Union.
What Western strategists celebrated as Chinese pragmatism was largely communist ideological fanaticism. This misreading became the intellectual foundation of one of America’s greatest strategic blunders.
Washington and its allies opened their markets, transferred technology, encouraged investment and welcomed communist China into the global free trade system. They assumed that capitalism would dissolve communist dictatorship and prosperity would produce political freedom.
President Clinton gave this fantasy its most memorable expression in his March 2000 speech at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies: “I believe the choice between economic rights and human rights, between economic security and national security, is a false one.”
A quarter century later, that confidence looks spectacularly misplaced and tragic. The establishment that championed engagement expected economic liberalization to weaken the CCP’s political monopoly. Instead, Beijing acquired Western capital, technology and markets while preserving and strengthening absolute political control.
Today, China is routinely described as the world’s second-largest economy. Far more consequential is its position as the world’s most powerful communist dictatorship, ruled by a Leninist organization of more than 100 million members. Its apparatus penetrates the military, government, universities, corporations and virtually every corner of Chinese society.
Beijing is poised to export its model of communist governance worldwide through economic dependency, military intimidation, technological dominance and political influence, all of which have become powerful instruments of communist expansion.
The ideological continuity from Mao to Xi Jinping remains unmistakable. The recent furor surrounding French soccer superstar Kylian Mbappe illustrates the point. His reported description of Mao as a dictator provoked Chinese denunciations and accusations of hurting the Chinese people’s feelings. Apparently, acknowledging Mao’s dictatorship remains an ideological offense in China.
Mr. Xi has revived ideological indoctrination, tightened party discipline and deployed artificial intelligence and advanced surveillance technologies to enforce conformity. Mao’s obsession with controlling thought and society now operates through 21st-century technology.
Yet Western elites continue describing Beijing through the fashionable vocabulary of great-power competition and the Thucydides Trap, treating China as another rising nationalist power demanding its rightful place in the international order.
Such explanations obscure the CCP’s Marxist-Leninist identity. Its doctrine of perpetual struggle, reinforced by Sino-centric civilizational superiority, guides its efforts to reshape international institutions, technological standards and political norms.
In Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, in universities and in influential media organizations, China’s authoritarian efficiency receives admiration while its human consequences are minimized. The tradition of Walter Duranty, who whitewashed Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union for The New York Times, survives wherever intellectual fashion or commercial interests excuse communist repression.
Meanwhile, ordinary Chinese citizens living under censorship and surveillance remain largely absent from these admiring narratives.
Anti-Communism Week also reveals something important about President Trump’s worldview. His transactional negotiating style coexists with a broader commitment to American exceptionalism, national sovereignty, religious freedom and resistance to authoritarian expansion.
Under him, Mike Pompeo and Marco Rubio — the two most anti-communist secretaries of state since John Foster Dulles — have articulated communism’s ideological challenge, from Beijing or Havana, with a clarity rarely heard in American diplomacy.
That commitment must transcend partisanship. America’s anti-communist tradition belongs to Democrats such as Presidents Truman and Kennedy as much as to Republicans.
The Bolshevik Revolution occurred 109 years ago. Its most powerful ideological descendant now commands a formidable economy, enormous military and more than 100 million CCP members, empowered in no small measure by the free world itself.
Anti-Communism Week calls for recovering the ideological clarity that sustained the free world through the Cold War. The lesson is especially urgent because the communist threat has grown more sophisticated, technologically advanced and embedded in the global economy.
The greatest triumph of Chinese communism is persuading the capitalist world to finance its rise while dismissing its ideological ambitions. The greatest failure of the free world is believing it has changed the CCP when the CCP has simply learned how to exploit and change the free world.
• Miles Yu is the director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute. His “Red Horizon” column appears every other Tuesday in The Washington Times. He can be reached at mmilesyu@gmail.com.
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