“The U.S. government has been guilty of mistakes in the past in terms of its policy toward China. Our current administration, which is the Trump (Trump) administration, has changed that to some extent and to some extent successfully.”
Yu Maochun said, “Because our understanding of the nature of the Chinese Communist Party is completely different, as Secretary Pompeo said, the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people are two different things, the Chinese Communist Party and China as a country are two different things, and that’s a completely different concept. So it’s very, very important to be able to distinguish that as well. I think the world is now starting to pay attention to this point as well, and more and more countries are starting to center on this point of view when they are formulating their policies towards China.”
The Chinese Communist Party is arguably one of the most demagogic, authoritarian, and largely Leninist parties in human history. That’s because of its ideology, but that’s not usually how we look at it. How do we understand the remarkable economic growth that China has achieved over the past 40 years? China’s economic growth is not because of the Chinese Communist Party; they could have achieved it even without it.
Yu Maochun was Pompeo’s senior China Policy staffer when he was secretary of state. He said the Chinese Communist Party is a parasitic system that is exploiting the wealth created by the pioneering Chinese people. They want to replace the U.S.-led international order with their dictatorial model of rule. But many people today still have illusions about the Chinese Communist Party, but internally they see the United States as their primary adversary, and that has never changed. Because the impact we have on the Chinese people is very great.
Yu Maochun was born in China and grew up during the Cultural Revolution, a decade of great change and many acts of violence that killed millions of people. he came to the United States in 1985 as an exchange student and then, for 26 years, was a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and then held a position at the State Department, and now he is a senior scholar at the Hudson Institute. He was interviewed in a personal capacity.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I’m Jan Jekielek.
Jan Jekielek: I’m Jan Jekielek, the host. As you know, YouTube doesn’t allow us to advertise right now, so please sign up for our mailing list so you can receive our latest show.
Mr. Maochun Yu, thank you for coming to the American Thought Leader show.
Maochun Yu: Thank you, it’s my pleasure.
Jacky Yang: Mr. Yu, you are a senior staffer to Secretary Pompeo on China, and as far as I know, you have played an important role in all policies related to the Chinese Communist Party, and today we’re going to talk about a lot of China policy-related topics.
China has a rich history and Culture, and the Chinese Communist Party is a brutal dictatorship.
First of all, I would like to ask, what is your knowledge of China that caught Secretary Pompeo’s attention? Can you give a brief overview of that in general terms?
Yu Maochun: Basically, China has two images in the eyes of the West, one is the Great Wall of China, its rich history, the amazing Chinese people, the pandas, the Chinese cuisine and other cultural concepts, which is very important. This is what the Chinese Communist Party wants the world to see and understand.
But on the other hand, the CCP is ruled by a Marxist-Leninist system of government, which definitely has a dictatorial tendency. This system forbids the independence of the individual, the freedom of the individual, and it keeps people’s minds neatly aligned. This system has a brutal dictatorial character, a Leninist character, a proletarian dictatorship, in their words. The Chinese state is repressive in character, especially in recent decades, because the CCP has high-tech support, which has helped them to further control the people, supervise its people, and control the state. So these two aspects of China’s character are sometimes confusing.
Those who want China to be better, they only see this image of China in front of them, they think its main image, its traditional culture, its people are kind, etc. But as policy makers, we have to be careful. But as policy advisers, we need to understand both images. So I think the U.S. government has been making mistakes in the past in terms of its policy toward China. Our current administration, the Trump Administration, has changed that to some extent, and to some extent successfully.
Because we have a completely different understanding of the nature of the Chinese Communist Party, and as Secretary Pompeo said, the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people are two different things, the Chinese Communist Party and China as a country are two different things, and that’s a completely different concept. So it’s very, very important to be able to distinguish that as well. I think now the world is also starting to pay attention to this point, and more and more countries are starting to center on this point of view when they make their policies towards China.
Yang Jiekai: What I’m thinking about is that China has a traditional cultural dimension, its cuisine, etc., and of course it has a Marxist-Leninist dimension, but there’s also the whole concept that China is now becoming like a capitalist country, right?
That people can now live better, millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, wealth, there is this overall impression now, how does this relate to what you just said?
The Chinese people want a free economy, the Chinese Communist Party is a parasite
Yu Maochun: Okay, let me reiterate, we have to distinguish the difference between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people.
Right now in our society, we rely heavily on two important concepts, one of which is the free enterprise system. I think this reflects the nature of man. And capitalism itself you don’t need to resort to complex ideas, assumptions or economics to understand it, capitalism is a kind of human nature, through its own pioneering spirit, to achieve goals for its own benefit, which is not necessarily bad, it can regulate the state of self-seeking, in fact the American system is based on it as an enlightenment movement, also based on the idea of free market. It is controlled by the invisible hand of the market to motivate people to go beyond themselves and do better.
The other is the spirit of the free market, the spirit of free pioneering, which, if it is to exist, must go hand in hand with individual freedom. Freedom is important because without it, nothing will happen, and you have to have freedom if you want to have a free market system. Then freedom includes many things, the most important and obvious one is the freedom of speech, the freedom of expression, and the government has to give permission to the people.
What you just said is that the current capitalist society in China actually reflects a state of the Chinese people’s daily Life, their nature, their spirit of freedom and enterprise, and they are also a group of people who love freedom.
But on the other hand, the Chinese Communist Party is in conflict with all this, so why the Chinese system as a whole is still a planned economy, of course there is some degree of free economy, but the Chinese Communist Party is basically a parasite, it is parasitic on the free economy of the Chinese people to suck blood.
Obviously, the CCP is also the enemy of the freedom-loving Chinese people, so they spend more and more money every year on repression, internal stability maintenance, supervision, and even more money than their defense budget, more and more every year. China’s defense budget is the second largest in the world, and no one can deny that China’s economy is now the second largest in the world. China’s economic growth is enormous, but it is almost 100 percent thanks to its private sector mechanism.
In other words, China’s economic growth is not due to the Chinese Communist Party. Even with the existence of the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese economy is still doing so well, so we see such a huge seismic confrontation now in China between the freedom-loving, free-enterprising capitalist spirit of the Chinese people on the one hand, and the Chinese Communist Party on the other.
The claim that the Chinese Communist Party can represent the 1.4 billion Chinese people is so absurd, and the CCP knows it, that Pompeo says that the Chinese people and the CCP are two different things. This claim scares the hell out of the CCP, and they are especially concerned about this because this hypocritical façade of theirs is actually very absurd, and they know it themselves, and it will lead to their eventual collapse.
The rise and fall of the Chinese Communist Party’s control over Jack Ma‘s shopping mall
Let’s take an example of a very successful Chinese businessman, Jack Ma, who has recently been subjected to some constraints by the Chinese Communist Party, which in itself is something to talk about. He has to do business within the system, and he can’t just do whatever he wants to do.
Yang Jiekai: You can clarify that this is a very good example.
Yu Maochun: You can. Ma Yun is Ma Yun precisely because the Chinese Communist government allowed him to be, and he eventually became Ma Yun. At first Alibaba worked with Yahoo in China, and later, Alibaba acquired their technology, their mode of operation from Yahoo and Amazon, which are foreign companies.
Then the Chinese Communist Party used all kinds of restrictive controls to kick these foreign companies out of China so that Jack Ma became Jack Ma, so it can be said that this is a state-protected, monopolistic act.
It is not a direct monopoly but an indirect monopoly to protect a very enterprising and smart person like Jack Ma, who also took advantage of this state protection to become the later Jack Ma.
But the irony is that once you become too big, once you become a threat, then you have to disappear. So once it gets into this funding system, financial sector, payment system of the Chinese Communist Party, it has to disappear. Because this has to be monopolized by the Chinese Communist Party, that’s one of the reasons I think.
In other words, China’s economy is a very strange hybrid state, that is, the CCP wants to control the main economic operations, it can allow the private sector to exist, but only to a certain extent, with certain restrictions, and only with the interests of the CCP at the core.
Once the spirit of free enterprise makes the economy grow beyond the CCP’s control, the CCP will no longer tolerate your continued existence. That’s why I think one of the most dangerous professions in China is the billionaire. Because you have so much influence, the Communist Party is at the top of the list, so it’s not a free market economy, and it’s crazy to allow a system that’s not a market economy to integrate into the free market of international trade. So it’s very, very ironic that the CCP joined the WTO.
Why did the Chinese Communist Party grow? It took advantage of the international free market economy
No major Western institution, no major international financial institution, no major country recognizes China’s economy as a free market economy, we should remember that, and yet it was able to integrate fully into the international system. Exactly, so fundamentally this is unfair, and this is a very major reason. Why was the CCP able to grow? Because it has taken advantage of the international free market economy that gives it benefits and advantages.
Jacky Yang: Mr. Yu, when did you realize that the U.S. policy toward China was fundamentally flawed? Which point in particular stood out and made you aware of it?
Yu Maochun: I can hardly say that there was such a moment, I think it was a continuous and gradual process. I think the June Fourth Incident was probably a turning point in my thinking. When June 4 happened, I was not the only one who was reflecting on the policy toward China, but the whole Western world was shocked by the Chinese Communist Party’s contempt for life and its insensitivity.
Because of my personal experience, I even had the mentality at that Time that I had predicted that you would not listen to me. I was hoping at that time that something so atrocious would happen, that it would wake everybody up and fundamentally change the policy approach to China, but obviously it didn’t happen after that.
We still have illusions today about the Chinese Communist Party, this very outdated 19th century missionary sentiment, as if because the Chinese government and the Chinese people they have this millennial historical burden that it is my duty and responsibility to bring the unfortunate Chinese people from the pre-industrial revolution era to the present modern world and make them a responsible nation, and I don’t have that sentiment. For me, this is totally unsupportable. As I said earlier, there is a fundamental difference between the Chinese people and the Chinese Communist Party.
The West is under the illusion that the CCP is actually a communist state
The Chinese people are freedom-loving, and the CCP is a very brutal Marxist-Leninist existence. We in the West have always underestimated that the CCP is still a communist state.
When we look at these communist regimes around the world, like the former Soviet Union, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba and Laos, I think the CCP is probably the most ideologically pushy and vicious Leninist party, but we rarely think about it from that perspective.
We always think of China as a country that carries the pressure and burden of 5,000 years of history, and then encounters reformers like Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang, who we never thought were first and foremost a group of dictatorial leaders pursuing a Western radical ideology, looking at their domestic policies, their international foreign policies, every policy they make is basically driven by such an ideology. But we don’t look at it from that perspective.
I think this is a fundamental shortcoming of U.S. foreign policy.
J.K. Yang: It’s interesting that you describe it that way, and I’ve been watching things develop over the years, and it reminds me of a very famous book called “Over the Limit Warfare,” which was written by two PLA officers, and one of the things that was very successful was the information war, the control of the information warfare, where the diplomats make requests and the Chinese expect a specific response from the United States. What you just said reminded me of that.
It wasn’t until the Trump administration that there was a clear division between the Chinese people and the Chinese Communist Party.
Yu Maochun: We have always maintained our best wishes and wishes for the success of the Chinese people. China, the Chinese people, and the Chinese Communist Party were not distinguished in the United States until the Trump administration. In this concept, we are very clearly divided.
I think there’s an interesting dichotomy in that we’ve always maintained good wishes for the success of the Chinese people, while China under the Chinese Communist Party has never considered the United States a true friend, and the Chinese Communist Party has always considered the United States to be the dominant so-called anti-China force, and the United States has always wanted to suppress the great socialist experiment in China.
So this persecution paranoia is very serious when they develop their strategy, and the development of all policies related to the United States is characterized by this, whether it’s negotiations on trade, the U.S. technology sector or the U.S. military sector. And this kind of interaction is part of the confrontation for them, how to defeat the U.S. hegemony, so within the Chinese Communist Party, the U.S. is identified as the ultimate enemy and opponent, and they never relax, which is basically the paranoia of persecution.
If we look at China’s current “Belt and Road” initiative, their trade approach, it’s a Leninist approach, it’s a highly vigilant approach. As a policy staffer, when you listen to the Chinese leaders, when they talk about mutual respect, you have to listen to other speeches, direct speeches, which are easy to hear in China, and sometimes I’m shocked.
For example, when Xi Jinping made some hostile and belligerent speeches, he would say, “Let’s say socialism will be victorious, for example, China will return to its glorious position under the leadership of the Communist Party,” and so on, and we all thought he was We all thought he was joking. I don’t think that’s his natural state, that’s his nature.
The Trump administration doesn’t want to create a false image of the CCP, we want to be real about it, not our fantasies.
Long-term blind optimism in U.S. foreign policy CCP is playing the American card
Yang Jiekai: I want to clarify one point, that is, before the Trump administration, you meant that U.S. foreign policy basically viewed China and the CCP with rose-colored glasses or blind optimism, is that right?
Yu Maochun: Yes. Whether it’s intentional or not, I think that’s the case.
The U.S. diplomatic system is a huge bureaucratic machine, and it takes a tremendous amount of energy just to maintain that bureaucracy, so most of our foreign policy with China has been spent on how to maintain a smooth and workable set of relations between the two countries, without paying attention to what is the right thing to do. That’s where our diplomacy with China has fallen short, we’ve never analyzed our policy, where it’s fallen short, and we’ve spent our diplomatic operations on how to maintain a relationship that is based on a flawed framework.
What the Trump administration has done is we have to change the framework itself and emphasize what is the right thing to do, so I think this can explain one of the main reasons why the Trump administration has been so successful, of course we are not doing everything right, but we are going in the right direction. This is one of the main aspects of Trump’s policy towards China.
The second particularly important aspect of our shortcomings is that no matter which president it is, every president has his top priorities, and for the United States, China has always been important, but not at the top of the list.
We generally use the China card as a foreign policy to achieve short-term diplomatic goals, meaning that China is never the ultimate goal of U.S. foreign policy, but rather a channel through which to achieve other strategic goals, such as defeating the Soviet Union, leaving Vietnam or resolving the North Korean nuclear issue, and so on.
The Chinese Communist Party knows this, and it has used it to control us. We think we are playing the China card, but in fact the CCP is playing the U.S. card, playing it much more skillfully and successfully than we are.
Three factors The Chinese Communist Party was the primary diplomatic challenge
Until President Trump. Since President Nixon, President Trump was the first president to realize this problem, and he believes that the CCP is the number one priority to address, and we have to change the current model of dialogue and change this mechanism, so we now see the CCP as an ultimate diplomatic target. In the diplomatic arena, there is no greater diplomatic challenge than the CCP.
Jacky Yang: It’s very interesting that China is no longer a channel, the CCP itself has become an ultimate target in the diplomatic arena for us. We know that every branch of the National Security Council under the Biden regime at the moment, they have some China-related activities, and their China policy is probably a continuation of what the Trump administration has done. My question is there are a lot of huge challenges in foreign policy, such as the Iran issue, the North Korea issue, and even the Russia issue, why do you think the Chinese Communist Party issue is at the top of the list and has to be treated separately from other issues?
Yu Maochun: We can look at it from three areas: first, intention, second, strength, and third, opportunity. Let’s start with intentions. In the past Nixon era, we only cared about political rights and interests at that time, we only cared about bilateral relations.
- Communist China’s intention: replacing the U.S.-led international order with dictatorship
Maintaining the relationship between the United States and China, so we rarely talk about the intentions of a country, the intentions of an opponent. The Chinese Communist Party will not compete with you in a peaceful, gentlemanly way; they want to replace the U.S.-led international order in exchange for this dictatorial model of governance of their own. Many people thought it might be limited to China, but they are now expanding internationally and globally, and the challenge is not just for the United States, it’s for the whole world.
From the beginning of the Trump administration, we believed that the Chinese Communist threat was not just to the United States, but to the entire freedom-loving free world, and we tried to bring all of our allies together to confront it in a multilateral way.
Secretary Pompeo has spent a lot of time building this global awareness, this global alliance against the Chinese Communist challenge, and many of our friends and allies didn’t see the Chinese Communist Party that way before, when they said we were unilateral, but they were actually the ones who were unilateral because they hadn’t wanted an alliance until last year when they finally came around and they recognized that the Chinese Communist Party posed an international threat, especially with the new crown Epidemic. Since it started, many countries, our friends and allies are now on our side. I think that’s a very important part of it.
Yang Jiekai: That’s the part where you talk about intentions.
Yu Maochun: We know that the Chinese Communist Party is not going to put up a friendly posture, they have always regarded the United States as their primary opponent, and by the way, one of the main reasons he is not just because Marxist-Leninist theory makes them so, American democracy and the American model of state management has a great influence on the Chinese people, it is very attractive, it makes the Chinese Communist Party very afraid, and that’s why the Chinese Communist Party is doing everything it can to smear the American system, to smear American democracy, and the new crown epidemic gives them the opportunity to do so.
There are many shortcomings in this country, such as racial issues, gender equality issues, etc., but the CCP is not in a position to criticize the United States for racial discrimination, because the CCP is the most racist regime in the world, and it will treat entire ethnic groups, such as the Uighurs, as a group of scorned people, and act against them, restrict the freedom of millions of people, and lock them up, but it is precisely such a country that accused the United States of being a racist nation after Freud was killed, so this level of hypocrisy couldn’t be more disgusting.
- The Communist Party of China has increased its power: by forced technology transfer, commercial espionage and other acts
The second is its strength. Because of our past failures in China policy, the CCP has taken advantage of this, the point of national freedom, the global spirit of free enterprise, to become very powerful and rich, and many of its practices are actually predatory in nature, let’s say this forced technology transfer, commercial espionage, and other factors that make the CCP more lethal.
The most important thing is the hard-working Chinese people, who have contributed to China’s wealth. But the working class in China is actually alienated to a certain extent, they create this wealth, and this wealth goes into the pockets of the CCP, and ultimately they have a lot of suffering, for example, the poor labor conditions in China, the trade union rights basically do not exist in China, and the working environment is quite poor, so this is also one aspect. With so many favorable conditions for the CCP, the CCP has been able to profit from them and become very rich.
With this kind of technological strength, this kind of economic strength, they have built a very powerful army and so on, they have built a lot of very important weapons platforms, in space, in the network, in the ocean and under the sea, so their strength now poses a much greater threat to us than before, so we have to face the Chinese Communist Party more seriously.
They are much stronger than Russia, and Russia is stronger than China in only one area, probably his nuclear arsenal. The probability of a nuclear war between the US and Russia is very small because there is no deterrence between the two sides, meaning that Russia and the US are not evenly matched. China’s economy, on the other hand, is arguably seven to eight times larger than Russia’s, and China’s budget for defense is about twice as large as Russia’s, a strength we must seriously confront. One thing that is very different between the CCP and Russia, and this is related to my third point, is that it poses a national security threat to the United States.
- Communist China takes advantage of opportunities: integration into the Western system
The third point is the opportunity. During the Cold War, the United States confronted the former Soviet Union, and each country had its own camp, its own alliance, but they were largely separate at the economic level, at the military level, and even at the social level, with almost no interaction between the two sides.
Compared to the Soviet Union, the CCP enjoyed a lot of opportunities to become richer and stronger because it was integrated into the international system, but at the same time it was under the control of the CCP as a regime, and they had more opportunities to exploit and exploit. So it’s much harder to deal with the CCP because they are integrated into our system.
Their technology is integrated into our system, into the global system, it is a member of the trade system, it is also a member of the technology system. Let’s say the Chinese Communist Party can send its monopoly on the WeChat App into the United States, grab huge amounts of information, and monitor people, so we don’t have a way to deal with that yet, mainly for legal reasons.
So the Chinese Communist Party poses a much more serious threat to us than any other person, so I just said these three things, its intentions, its strength and its opportunity to do so. This regime, the Chinese Communist Party, poses the primary challenge to the security of the United States. We have from the very beginning, from December 2017 just after the Trump administration took office, the White House released such a national security strategy and clearly articulated that we have to focus on all aspects that pose a threat to us, and at the top of that list is the Chinese Communist Party.
The Chinese Communist Party will not compete peacefully, but will fight international capitalism to the death.
Yang Jiekai: You mentioned earlier that the CCP is basically parasitic on China and the Chinese people, and it is integrated into the international system, does this mean that the CCP is actually parasitic on the whole world?
Yu Maochun: You can say this theoretically, I think the whole world has now reached a conclusion that this status quo must be changed. Of course we would like to believe that these two systems can compete together peacefully, but this is impossible, because the Chinese Communist Party has always wanted to confront international capitalism, it is a confrontation of you and me, this is their point of view, they will not compete with us peacefully. When Khrushchev told President Eisenhower to let us compete peacefully, he was lying, because there was no way the whole Soviet system could allow imperialism to exist, they needed to destroy, destroy international capitalism.
The Chinese Communist Party arguably followed that, but it did it in a much more sophisticated and subtle way, and it was we allowed the Chinese Communist Party to integrate into this international order of ours, so I think the world is now going to wake up.
Yang Jiekai: What you just said, that the CCP has subdued most of the elite class of U.S. policy towards China?
Yu Maochun: That’s right.
Yang Jiekai: What do you mean by subdue?
Yu Maochun: What I mean is that the CCP can use this influence to control outside access to China, to the Chinese leadership. And the Chinese Communist Party can use their money to influence so that you have to rely on the Beijing authorities. So many people in the U.S. who have left the U.S. government have had to beg the elite of the CCP for access to Chinese affairs, and this has created a very unhealthy, very dangerous, permanent lobby that speaks for the CCP.
There are a lot of people in the U.S. government who have served in high office and have retired and left office, and they basically do this advisory consulting work. They don’t just do consulting for companies, they also do consulting for the Chinese Communist government because you can hire them, and that’s what this free market entrepreneurship is all about.
I think one of the major accomplishments of the Trump administration is that he has been able to formulate China policy in a way that minimizes the negative impact that groups that lobby for the Chinese Communist Party can have on us, and believe me I know this very well because I’ve been involved in it since the beginning.
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