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Oct. 30, 2025 - Epoch Times
39:04
This is the CCP’s Greatest Weakness | Amb. Sam Brownback
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Time Text
Ronald Reagan went at the Soviet Union before he was president and he went at them on their values and their rights.
There is a moral core here.
This isn't a competition between the largest economy and the second largest economy.
This is a competition of ideals and we've got the better ones.
Ahead of President Trump's expected meeting with Xi Jinping, I'm sitting down with Ambassador Sam Brownback, co-chair of the International Religious Freedom Summit and author of the upcoming book, China's War on Faith.
Religious believers are the only community left that we can work with inside of China that would stand up to this regime.
And that's why the regime spends billions of dollars to oppress and suppress and control every single religion.
I think it is our most powerful tool in undermining the regime.
Support the Tibetan Buddhist.
Support the Muslim Uyghurs.
Support the Christians that are in prison.
Ask for their release.
We support the fallen Gong people being able to practice their faith in China as they see fit.
It will drive the Chinese communists nuts.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanye Kellek.
Ambassador Sam Brownback, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Thanks, John.
Good to join you.
Recently, the Chinese Communist Party arrested a whole number of leaders of the Zion Church in China.
You know, part of their overall constant crackdown on faith.
But why this group?
Why now?
I think they're hostages.
I think that'd be their better way to look at it instead of just saying, well, this is some random sort of church raid that they did or do all the time.
I think they're hostages.
I think it was purposeful.
I think it was right ahead of the Xi Jinping meeting with Trump that he did it.
It's sort of like the rare earth issue where he says, I'm going to cut off rare earth minerals being exported to the United States, to try to create this sort of maximum pressure environment.
You've got a lot of Christians in Washington and the United States that are interested.
I think it is one of the most ham-handed things the Chinese could have done.
I think it's one of the most ridiculous things, kind of like wolf diplomacy, if you will.
This is an oxymoron.
You aren't going to be achieving diplomatic gains by being a wolf.
I think it's a terrible move, but I think it's strategic and one that they've done to create pressure on President Trump.
The President has mentioned that he may bring up the incarceration of Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong as part of these discussions.
So that's interesting because he's indicated an interest in something other than trade when it comes to this whole picture.
How do you read that?
Promising, because previously, and often President Trump has wanted to really kind of try to isolate things.
Let's just talk about economic issues or let's just talk about security issues.
So if he's saying we want to talk about economic plus some human rights issues, to me that's encouraging.
You know, he wants to get a trade deal with Xi Jinping.
He wants to do that to be able to help the economy.
He wants to be able to help soybean farmers in red states be able to export into China.
These are normal pressure points that you expect and I think you'll see.
But if he wanders into the human rights space, that's, I think, actually where the payload is in our confrontation with China.
You've got to talk about this horrific record they have on human rights.
And you've got to talk about it to the world.
It isn't like, okay, if we trade China for U.S. on economic and global leadership, it'll all be the same.
These are two diametrically different systems.
I think we've really got to talk about these systems and not just about economic and trade issues.
So we're filming this shortly before President Trump's meeting with Xi Jinping.
What advice would you give to the president, given everything that you know about how the Chinese regime operates?
If you want to hit him where it hurts, hit them on human rights issues, genocides in their own country, religious freedom that they don't grant any of their people, whether they be Buddhist, Muslim, Falen Gong, Christians, that's where they're the weakest.
It's where they're the most vulnerable globally.
If you're not interested in that, just cut a trade deal and call it good for now, although you've got to know in your own heart this isn't going to be good for very long.
Xi Jinping has designs on the world.
We may not think we're in a Cold War with Xi Jinping and China right now, but they believe they are.
And they've built a military up to have this.
They have built up allies of dictators.
They've got an operational axis of evil with Russia and Iran, North Korea, and a number of other satellite countries.
This thing is already operational against us, whether we believe we're in the fight or not.
And I think we ought to really start hitting them where they're the most vulnerable.
Ronald Reagan went at the Soviet Union before he was president, and he went at them on their values and their rights.
He went at them and he said, look at what happens to the Jewish refuseniks.
Look what happens to the evangelicals by the godless communist that he would use.
He'd use very pejorative terms.
But what he was doing, he's speaking with clarity to the United States community and the broader freedom-loving community about who we're up against.
And I do believe the president needs to start speaking in those types of terms about who we are up against.
The president is known to talk about the cards, what cards you have.
And you mentioned some of the leverage that the CCP has been using.
For example, this rare earth, unprecedented attempt at use of rare earths, but also this kind of hostage diplomacy, adding a bit of leverage, you know, with arresting these Christian leaders.
How do you think human rights becomes leverage for the president?
I think it becomes leverage as we start talking about it.
If Secretary of State Rubio flew to Dharm Salah and met with the Dalai Lama and endorsed his third way approach of a separate independent Tibet inside of China that freaks Chinese leadership out.
If the president were to meet with fallen Gong leaders in the White House, that creates huge pressure internally inside of China.
These are the sort of things that don't really cost any money, but the visual imagery of it, if the president were to meet in the Oval Office with a series of people that have been persecuted by Chinese Communist Party and just has them tell their story, that creates leverage back because it shows what system we are up against.
And that's what we really need to do, in my estimation, more than anything right now.
This just isn't an economic competition.
This isn't a competition between the largest economy and the second largest economy.
This is a competition of ideals.
And we've got the better ones.
Ours are proven and they work and they work in various places around the world.
And communism hasn't worked anywhere.
And one other just quick point.
The Chinese communists are very big about pointing out that these religions are imports to China.
Christianity, Islam, something else.
You know, the real import to China is communism.
Communism was developed in Europe, the mid-1800s, and it's being imposed on the Chinese people.
This is the carpetbagger, is communism, more than anything.
You described three genocides happening in China.
I agree with this, you, but I just want to explore that a little further.
And also, just to be clear, this term genocide is used so liberally these days by people for some kind of a significant number of people dying.
Sometimes people will call that a genocide.
Genocide is something quite specific and extreme.
And maybe if you can just explain that to me and why you think there's three and what they are.
Yeah, genocide is very specific.
It involves a lot of carnage and death and attack of people, but it's an identified group of people that this group of people in power seeks to eliminate.
So there's an intentionality that goes along with the genocide too.
We want to wipe out this group of people.
You've got the one declared of the Uyghurs, Muslim Uyghurs in Western China that the United States has declared multiple administrations now and multiple countries have.
You've got one against the Tibetan Buddhist that has been going on longer even than the Uyghur genocide has been going on.
And it's both at its culture and it's at its control level and it's killed a number of people as well.
And there's a third one, a fallen gong.
And they've arguably had it the worst of anybody, where you've had this overt, aggressive attack that includes things like forced organ harvesting, that you've talked about a great deal, that is just mind-blowing in its graphic, horrific nature.
But it doesn't even stop there.
It's just an attempt to literally wipe out this group.
And it's intentional and it's focused and they spend a lot of money to do it.
Imagine this.
You've got three genocides going on right now.
And here, this is a country that holds itself up for respect in the world.
And you're doing three genocides and you're the second largest economy in the world and we're dealing with you.
And you're doing these things now in front of our very eyes and we know about it.
The Western world in particular, the free world, really has to stand up more against this.
You raise such an important point here, actually, because if we're making deals, right, we have to understand that we're either working with the same value system or we're working with a different value system.
And you're pointing out, obviously, a very different value system.
So that Hopefully, it would inform our decision-making around dealmaking, right?
I mean, I think for many years, this was not something that we really understood, frankly, in the West broadly, not just in the United States.
China thinks of the West and of barely everybody as part of the Green Party.
And by green, I mean money.
Just that money buys it all.
It buys loyalty of your own citizens.
If we get the economy growing and you just leave us in power, they're just part of the Green Party.
And then the West is too.
Well, and the Soviets in their era, they said, you know, you give the West enough rope, they'll hang themselves.
You know, it's just part of the Green Party.
They just want money.
But at the end of the day, that actually, that's just not true.
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Arguably, this is something that Lee Smith argues in his recent book, The China Matrix, is that one of the big reasons why so many American elites kind of got in bed with the CCP was because they became part of the Green Party.
I mean, to use your terminology now.
Yeah, no, but that's the actually that's the point.
When Davos brings in one of the top Chinese leaders a couple years ago to speak at Davos, you're going, well, wait a minute.
Look at what this country is doing.
And why are you hosting this individual here in front of these mega big global company leaders?
Well, it's all Green Party then in that situation.
But that's not where the American people are.
The American people are interested in making a good living.
They're interested in making money.
There's also a moral core here that they're going, no, we're just not going to do certain things or be a part of certain things.
And they're not going to be a part of the Green Party.
And they don't want their country used to be a part of the Green Party.
And I think that's where the Chinese Communist Party view of the world as it's just all Green Party breaks down.
Because there is a moral core here.
And that's what Reagan saw and understood with the Soviet Union.
You appeal to that moral core of the people of the United States.
And that's what I really hope President Trump will do.
Well, so you mentioned this organ harvesting industry.
Of course, it's on my mind.
I'm writing as we speak, you know, a book that's due very urgently.
So this is something I think about all the time.
I'm thinking about this hot mic moment, right?
We have Vladimir Putin talking about achieving immortality through continual organ transplantations, if I slightly paraphrase, and then Xi Jinping saying, talking about 150-year lifespan.
How did you react to that?
I was aghast.
I know about the organ harvesting things.
I thought the only way you get the organs that you want is to kill somebody.
And that person is probably a religious person or somebody that believes in human rights or is opposed to the regime.
So you're going to kill somebody so you can live to be 120 or 150.
And you're intentional about it.
And you're willful to do it.
I mean, what leader thinks of their own people that way other than a diabolical one?
So this whole organ harvesting industry, it grew exponentially in the early 2000s and kind of hit some kind of a plateau around 2005.
Hospitals are being built en masse.
There's no organ donation system or registry or anything like that.
They're telling everyone these are death row prisoners that are being used.
The thing that struck me, right, is it turns into something like, I've been told, a $9 billion a year industry.
I think this was David Matis's estimate, based on, you know, kind of years of research and understanding all these numbers.
But the thing that struck me after this hot mic moment was that if you're one of the Chinese elite, if you're one of those 7 million red card holders that has access to even the highest, most elite health care that exists over there, you have unlimited on-demand organs available to you forever.
And that's worth more than even a few billion dollars, isn't it?
If you're an amoral person.
If you're an amoral person, this is worth all the money you've got.
Because once you lose the life here, that's it for you.
It's an old saying that, you know, for the dictator may take the life of the martyr, but once the martyr's life ends, it actually begins for him.
Once the dictator's life ends, it ends for him.
And you've got dictators and people in position that are willing to harvest somebody else's organs so that they can live longer.
I mean, the words hurt to say.
And that's going on by one of your major global leading countries.
How can you see a system like that leading the world and then leading all these other dictatorial authoritarian countries?
This is the way to look at it.
If you've got the power, you take the organ.
It's yours.
That is a horrific world to consider.
That is a world driven by evil.
How much of the Chinese population do you think knows?
I mean, based on what you know, that this is actually happening?
I don't think a very big percentage do at all.
I think that it's very controlled.
Obviously, the great China firewall controls a lot of the information that can go in.
I don't think the general population knows.
And my sense of it is the general population is so demoralized about the ability to change the system that, you know, the saying that it's like they deal with the government like they deal with the weather.
You just try to observe, do I need to put a coat on now before I go outside or not?
I can't change the weather, but I can put a coat on or I can take an umbrella.
And I would hope that we would start to instill, at least particularly in the religious people, no, there is hope, and we will stand up for you.
And that's why I talk really about the religious people so much and all of them.
Because here is a group that's still there.
It's the biggest civil society organization that exists within China yet today.
It's a group that answers to a higher authority than the Communist Party.
It's a group that's willing to put their lives on the line to stand up for their freedoms.
And we should be standing for them.
We should be standing up and giving them hope, giving them hope that somebody outside hears us, and this is just not one of those situations where it's the weather, you can't change it.
No, this can change, and we're going to stand with you to change it.
Sam, I think you're raising such an incredibly important point.
And I just want to kind of build on this a little bit.
A lot of people don't understand that communism is totalitarian and in this totalitarian structure, it hates and tries to destroy all semblance of civil society.
Because civil society, by definition, is not under its boot, right?
And so what you're describing, and it does this very jealously, and has been doing it from the beginning, and that's what makes it impossible to change except religious believers.
Right?
Religious believers are the only community left that we can work with inside of China that would stand up to this regime, and that's why the regime spends billions of dollars to oppress and suppress and control every single religion within the country.
And why I think we've been in malpractice in the West by not standing up more for these religious communities that are in our fundamental belief system, we believe their right to religious freedom and we believe it applies to everybody.
And we haven't been standing with them sufficiently.
And the other thing, we saw this in some of the Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union.
Once Ronald Reagan started talking about the Jewish refuseniks, it gave them hope.
They started fighting back more.
They started resisting more because they had hope now that somebody was actually listening who had some potential and could do something about it.
And that's what we need to do for them now.
You know, something also strikes me here.
You mentioned how you think, and I actually agree with you, that most Chinese really have no idea of some of the depths of depravity that the CCP has gone to.
You know, we use, at epoch times, we use firewall, a variety of firewall busting softwares that are actually incredibly effective at breaking through that firewall.
And I keep thinking about that.
You know, if more Chinese had it, and it's not, it's a drop in the bucket in a sense compared to the 1.3 billion odd Chinese that are there.
But it is some millions that are regularly accessing through these systems.
But if that could be increased, right, if people could actually understand that what this regime is doing and how and the benefits it's offering to its super elites and what the human cost of that is to the Chinese people themselves and their moral stature and all of it, right?
That's something really powerful in that.
It's powerful and it'll change people.
The Soviet Union during its year, and I keep going back to it, but the fight is substantially similar.
They had these stores in the Soviet Union that you can only buy with things with foreign currency because they were short of foreign currency.
They had sheets on front of the store, so you had to walk in, you had to be a foreigner, have foreign currency to get in the stores.
And I remember being there as a young man, and we were on, there was an exchange program.
And I'm going, how did these things exist?
Why aren't the people just mad as hops that they can't go in a store that I can go in?
Well, it did make them mad.
They didn't like it.
And it's the same sort of thing here.
Once we tell people about, okay, there's a whole health care system that you don't have access to, and you're never going to get access to it unless somehow you become an elite within the Communist Party.
And that system has organs that they harvest from people illegally and clearly without their will and not with their donation.
I think you really do start to build this anger up about the system and you start to showcase its own evil nature.
And I think this is just a regime who I hope is towards the end of its life expectancy of spreading and having this sort of evil over its own people and over the world.
You know, I posted last night from the China Forum the very powerful testimony of Grace Jendrexel, the daughter of the pastor, key pastors of the Zion Church.
And immediately all sorts of, let's say, very pro-Chinese Communist Party accounts jumped in and started attacking and all sorts of stuff in the comments.
And I was just thinking to myself, man, like this X is banned in China, right?
But these people just have complete free access and to do, just be kind of really, really nasty.
And it's like, yeah, that's part of the cost of being in a free country and allowing for free speech and so forth.
But there's absolutely no reciprocity here, right?
No.
And we need to make it reciprocity.
We need to make it costly on their side.
Well, I was governor of Kansas.
We had a fusion center where we could get, until I could get access to intelligence information.
And the number of probings we had by China, Russia, and Iran-based probers and group into the state of Kansas was huge and daily, regular, trying to get into systems, nuclear power plant, railroad operations, just all over the place.
We're fighting it off all day long.
Well, we ought to be going at them.
And particularly on the information systems, because information is such a warfare tool anymore.
We've got to maximize the use of that.
And as I say, breaking down that firewall is one of the key ways to do it.
And just free information.
Free information.
Yeah, that's what we're asking to do is just be able to regular Chinese person to get free information, where now they don't have that.
They don't have access, so they only react to the information that they have.
And what it all gets is boon-fed to them by the Chinese Communist Party.
You say that the Chinese Communist Party is preparing the Chinese people for war.
Can you explain exactly what you mean by that?
There's studies on this about how governments prepare people for war, how the governments prepare people for peace.
And usually for war, it's to identify a people that you're opposed to, and then to really start painting them as dark figures, as bad actors, as people that are after them.
You're seeing that in the language that China is using with its own people towards the United States.
And then you just see it in the sheer military buildup that they've got going on now.
They've got a Navy bigger and newer than ours.
Why do they need a big Blue Sea Navy?
What's their objective here with this?
Why have they tanked their economic relationships with the West and particularly with the United States and built up a military at the same time?
Is that not obvious on its face?
And then Xi Jinping two months ago has this Davos of dictators, as a friend of mine has referred to it as, getting together.
And if that doesn't send you just this clear message of here is a group that's lined up with evil intentions against us and against the Western democratic, open human rights system, I don't know what more proof you need That this is a preparation and a preparing of a people and a whole side for war.
You know, I'll mention a couple of things that are, I guess, more on the hopeful side.
So, having watched this whole reality of organ harvesting evolve in terms of how much awareness there is and how much willingness, as you point out, it's very hard to even find sometimes willing people to learn about this issue because it's so macabre, because it's so horrible when you realize what it really means that innocent people are being murdered for these organs.
Well, the last few years, there's been a massive sea change in terms of understanding, at least from my view, watching over 20 years.
There's these two pieces of legislation, two in the Senate now have passed the House to target this issue in a very meaningful way.
There's one in committee, even.
So, there's even a third piece of legislation.
There's multiple states.
Just as we were sitting down, I saw that Wisconsin is bringing up an organ harvesting bill, which I think they're quite likely to pass.
So, there is sort of some kind of positive change, at least in our ability here to address this and just kind of at least accept that it's real and maybe challenge it somewhat.
That's one side.
The other side is, and this is a story I don't get to tell often enough, is this the quit the Communist Party or Tuidang movement in China, where over the last 20 years, the Felon Gong have been going around talking to individual people, encouraging them to quit the Chinese Communist Party and its related organizations, and they've managed to get over 450 million people to do so.
There's a kind of power in that.
And I wish we could tell this story more.
There's only so much you can try, right?
But there's really some very positive things happening in China as well.
Very positive things.
I remember having a conversation with David Eisenhower several years back about what was taking place in China.
And David Eisenhower is a grandson of Dwight Eisenhower, son-in-law of Richard Nixon, well-educated, very knowledgeable about global issues.
And I said, what's going on in China?
Because this is when Xi Jinping was really starting to really grab power.
And he said, well, I don't know, I'm not a China expert.
But he said, they're not acting like a confident leader.
They're acting like an authoritarian, a bully, somebody that's not confident in their system.
They're not confident of the long-term trajectory of where they're going.
And I thought, that's what it seems like to me.
They're acting just much more, we've got to do this by strength instead of by persuasion.
We've got to do this not by example, but we've got to do it just by ruthlessness.
That's not a confident leadership.
That's a leadership that's scared.
I think there's a lot of signs here of real aging of this party's ability to lead.
So one of the big topics at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation's China Forum was this idea of transnational repression, which is the Chinese Communist Party extending that persecution of people that it does back home actually to America and other countries in the West.
You recently visited the Shenyun headquarters and where the Shenyun dancers are trained and the college there and so forth.
And so this is a group that I've been following very closely.
We've been sponsors of Shenyun for a long time and who are subjected to this type of transnational repression in a very surprising way.
Can you spell out to me why the CCP would be so obsessed with Shenyun?
Yeah, it doesn't make sense, does it?
So here's a show of beauty.
I've attended one of the presentations of it here at the Kennedy Center.
Here's a show of beauty of Chinese culture, and the Chinese Communist Party is opposed to it.
You're going, why?
Well, because it represents the Chinese culture before the communists came in power.
It represents what a carpetbagger system Chinese communism is to the history, the thousands of years of history of Chinese civilization.
It, in many respects, goes right at the philosophical base of governing China.
Should it be governed by a continuation of Chinese culture or some representation of that?
Or should it be governed by these authoritarian dictators that claim a communism that's not Chinese at all, not Chinese civilization at all?
It's developed in Europe, as I said earlier.
The other thing is, too, and it's amazing to me, and it's just taken me a while to get it.
Chinese people are very spiritual.
Just on a natural basis, communism is completely atheistic.
Shenyu reminds them of how spiritual Chinese people are, and that's a complete threat to the Chinese Communist Party that demands adherence only to the government.
What Shenyu represents is the historical thousands of years of Chinese culture, which is what the supporters of Shenyu want to bring back to China.
They just, let's have the beautiful Chinese culture that's been suppressed and stomped on and damaged by the Chinese Communist Party.
Just get that cancer out of here.
And that's what Shenyu shares is this cultural value and this cultural beauty of what China is, but yet subject to transnational oppression.
So now China figures out how, okay, how can we send drones in on the training area?
How can we bring lawsuits against Shenyu?
How can we use the West legal system to create difficulties for a group that simply really wants to showcase Chinese beautiful thousands of years of culture?
Here's this beauty of a culture versus an oppressive Chinese communist regime and the oppressive regime really using the West systems and openness in an oppressive way.
You talked about earlier how religious freedom is this kind of chink in the armor of communism.
And I mean I'm extrapolating a little bit here, but how can Americans, how can they support that aside from prayer, obviously, would be one way.
But this seems like a very powerful thing.
You know, I would start with prayer because of the importance and the power of that.
But secondly, it's really getting into the technical and supporting of this in China.
Did an article this week where we're saying we should care about the religious oppression in China.
The American people should care about this.
I think it is our most powerful tool in undermining the regime.
I think it's similar to what Reagan did towards the Soviet Union.
You undermine the legitimacy of the regime and how it treats its own people.
I think people can hold this up as examples.
I think they can hold forums in their own communities.
I think they can get a hold of their congressmen and senators and say, you know what, we should support religious freedom in China.
We should be robust about it and we should be specific.
We should support, we support the Fallen Gong people being able to practice their faith in China as they see fit.
And it's appropriate that they should.
They should invite people that have been persecuted, that are Fallen Gong, to speak in radio stations or in venues that they have.
And they're here.
The number of people that have fled China off of religious oppression that are in the United States is substantial of all kinds.
I think just really raising that awareness amongst people themselves and pushing for, finally, religious freedom to be a national security issue for the United States, religious freedom in China to be a national security issue for us would be key.
It's not just a human right and certainly not a boutique human right.
It's a foundational freedom and it actually is foundational for our national security.
Pushing that would be very helpful.
Just spell it out.
How is religious freedom in China, you know, so far away, a national security issue for America?
Spell it out for me.
Well, it's a national security.
This is our erstwhile enemy, the Chinese Communist Party, not the Chinese people.
My wife and I have adopted a Chinese daughter.
She's a wonderful lady.
The Chinese people are wonderful people.
It's not the Chinese people.
It's the Chinese Communist Party.
They are our erstwhile enemy.
They have organized a group of dictators against the United States, and we need to go at them like they're going at us.
And one of the key ways we could do it would be to support religious freedom amongst the people in China.
Support the Tibetan Buddhists.
Support the Muslim Uyghurs.
Support the Christians that are in prison.
Ask for their release.
Support the Fallen Gong practitioners and their ability and publicly do so in the White House, in the Congress, in venues that we have here.
It will drive the Chinese communists nuts.
Crazy, because now you're talking about hundreds of millions of Chinese in country now, in their country now, that somebody's actually speaking out for if this is the way they're treating their own people.
And this word gets out.
I think it's one of the most powerful tools we actually have in our confrontation with the Chinese Communist Party today.
And you say it'll drive them nuts, but some people in the national security and diplomatic establishments say driving them nuts prevents us from being able to negotiate with them.
How would you respond to that?
You don't negotiate with evil.
You kick it out.
In the Soviet era, when we were détente, and well, we'll exist, they'll exist, everything will be fine.
And that bumped along for a couple of decades.
And Ronald Reagan comes in and he says, this is an evil system.
You don't tolerate evil.
You confront it and you defeat it.
There's not a coexistence with evil.
And I think we need to talk with that level of moral clarity in the current situation today.
Well, Ambassador Sam Brownback, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
My pleasure, Jan, my pleasure.
And best to you and to this program and to the book you're writing and working on forced organ harvesting.
It's just so important these things be brought to light.
Thank you, Ambassador.
Thank you all for joining Ambassador Sam Brownback and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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