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June 28, 2024 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec

01:34:56

HUMAN EVENTS: THE CHINA FILES SPECIAL

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	This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth generation warfare.
	A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.
	This is Human Events with your host, Jack Posobiec.
	Christ is King!
	Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard for a very special four-part series that we've decided to put together for you.
	This Christmas week.
	It's called the China files.
	And for a long time, I've wanted to sit down and talk to you a lot about the history of China.
	I remember this time last year, we did a history of Taiwan episode that did really well.
	And I said, you know what?
	I want to get into this.
	Even Charlie had reached out to me the other day and said, Jack, you got to talk about Maoism more.
	You have to talk Maoism more.
	So I, so I said, all right, let's do it.
	We're going to do a four-part series.
	And so let me say to you, Welcome to the China Files, part one, Warlords of the Revolution.
	So let's go all the way back to the late Qing dynasty, the 1800s, late 1800s in China.
	You have to understand what kind of country, what kind of land we're dealing with.
	This is the land of foot binding.
	This is the land of all adult males being forced to shave their heads except for one long braid in the back.
	The Manchus required that.
	The Manchus were seen as a foreign leadership and these were the ones that ruled the Qing Dynasty.
	But what even are dynasties?
	It's a dynasty.
	We don't have those in the U.S.
	We don't have those in the West anymore.
	We had kings at one point.
	Well, a dynasty for about 3,500 years in ancient and medieval China, they were ruled by these dynasties, by these royal families, the Han, the Tang, the Ming, the Qing, the Song, so many of them.
	And yet the Qing dynasty towards the end, they were seen as corrupted.
	They were always seen as foreign.
	But they had been just defeated by the British in the opium wars.
	Wars fueled by the rise of opium and the increase of the illegal drug inside China.
	They were then defeated.
	Hong Kong was established as a colony for the British.
	Shanghai was opened up to the British and the French.
	Later on, the Boxer Rebellion was an anti-foreigner rebellion that was covertly funded by the Qing Dynasty.
	But that was itself defeated by the Eight Nation Army, which included troops from the United States, Germany, France, the UK, and even Japan.
	And they came in and occupied Beijing.
	So the Qing Dynasty, it was viewed by many as having lost what's called the Mandate of Heaven.
	And the Mandate of Heaven, it's similar to the European Divine Right of Kings, but the Mandate of Heaven can be lost.
	Can be lost if a ruler becomes oppressive, incompetent, neglectful, or failed to govern responsibly.
	Famine, pestilence, disease.
	These are all harbingers of losing the mandate of heaven.
	And so a rebellion took place by the people and initially something called the Republic of China was born.
	The Republic of China.
	And this was led by Sun Yat-sen and later led By a man by the name of Jiang Yishou, or better known in English as Chiang Kai-shek.
	However, Sun Yat-sen gets overthrown by a warlord, Yuan Shikai.
	And there are many warlords all over Northern China, particularly Northern China, but you also see them in the West and other areas.
	And so China almost becomes up for grabs because this new Republic of China is not able to fully take over all of the land of China.
	It's seen in many areas like the West as bandit country, no man's land, lawlessness, warlords taking over in the North, in the South, parts of the coast, gangs rising up taking over places in Hong Kong, city streets.
	And the Soviet Union to the North of China realized that they too had an opportunity in this new China with no dynasty.
	And so the Soviet Union worked with a group of scholars and a group of radicals all the way back in 1921 to hold a meeting in Shanghai.
	The first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party.
	Mao Zedong was not the originator of this meeting, but he did attend it.
	It's a small building in a Shurkumen stone two-story building.
	Still there in Shanghai.
	I've been there.
	And you can go and see where the Chinese Communist Party began.
	And in fact, several members of that initial meeting were also part of the KGB.
	They were members of Soviet intelligence forces.
	So from the very start, the CCP was a foreign funded, foreign financed organization.
	But very early on, Chairman Mao, even before he was chairman, Grown up the son of a peasant.
	He didn't want to work in the fields.
	His father also became a grain merchant, started to get a little bit of money.
	But Mao didn't want to follow in his footsteps.
	Mao wanted something else.
	Mao wanted revolution.
	But what Mao did learn from growing up in Hunan province was the power of thugs, the power of banditry, the power of martial force and brutal violence.
	And these, in a way that might seem strange to so many people, These tactics that would cause so many of us to recoil.
	Brutal tactics.
	Burning villages.
	Torture.
	They seemed to excite Chairman Mao.
	He seemed almost to derive pleasure from this.
	And so his brand of Marxism, which would later become known as Mao Zui, Maoism, was so more brutal than any type of communism that's ever been seen prior or even since.
	Because he viewed purification of the country as only to be able to come through pain.
	Purification through pain.
	And as the Chinese Communist Party grew in the West, and then later came into conflict with the Republic of China, Mao continued to use those tactics.
	And his army, which later became known as the Red Army, used those same tactics on any peasant, any leader, any merchant that got in their way, brutally tortured, executed in public.
	Because Mao believed that all of these things should be done in public so that the peasantry would understand who was now in power.
	And I know I'm skipping around a lot, but we've got a couple more segments on this.
	But I want you to understand, before we go to break here, that it was through these brutal tactics that Mao was able to establish his reign of terror throughout the entire countryside of Western China, while financed and funded by the Soviet Union.
	So throughout the 1920s, this clash between the nationalists and the communists continued.
	In fact, in the city of Shanghai, there was an event at one point, April 1927, known as the Shanghai Massacre.
	And that's when the nationalists joined with a Hei Sha Huay, or a black society, what we might call a triad, called the Green Gang.
	And the Green Gang went in to do the dirty work of the nationalists.
	And what did they do?
	you They systematically purged and assassinated every single communist they could find that night in Shanghai, because they went through at the orders of the nationalists to get rid of these guys and kick them out.
	This continued and continued all the way up and up through the early 1930s and through the early 1930s.
	There were two, actually two, major conflicts going on in China.
	Number one was this continuing and ever-expanding civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists.
	But number two, starting in 1931, you saw an invasion of China by Japan.
	Now, at first it was a limited engagement, limited invasion, just in the area of Manchuria.
	Which the Japanese later formed as a puppet controlled state called Manchukuo.
	And they found, do you remember that Qing Dynasty?
	They found the last son of the Qing Dynasty, who was himself Manchurian, and created this sort of puppet emperor for him up in, there's a great movie about this called The Last Emperor, you can go watch.
	His name was Pu Yi.
	And they fashioned that up in China's northeast.
	So just across from where you would see The Korean Peninsula now and China and Japan had fought over the Korean Peninsula at this point.
	By the way, Japan also controlled Taiwan because the Treaty of Shimonoseki and I believe 1894 and the fallout of the former Sino-Japanese War.
	So Japan's got their foothold in China.
	Then in 1931 that increases with this Manchukuo invasion.
	So the nationalists are fighting a two-front war because they're fighting the communists to the West.
	And now they're fighting the Japanese to the northeast.
	So what happens?
	The continued fighting and the continued defeats of the communists at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek drive the Red Army and the CCP into, to essentially be encircled.
	They're completely encircled by Chiang Kai-shek's armies.
	And they're pushed out of Eastern China.
	Eastern China is that coastal region.
	They're pushed out completely.
	And so, Mao decides that the only thing left is a retreat.
	He's got no vehicles at this point.
	He's barely got any horses.
	All he's got are his feet and the feet of his army.
	And so he begins the most massive retreat in CCP history.
	It's called the Long March.
	Late in 1934, he marches all the way out to rural Yan'an province.
	As far as possible as he can go into that bandit country that we were talking about before.
	Loses 90% of the Red Army on the way.
	Either to desertion, disease, injury, infection.
	Things look bleak.
	But then, something happens that falls right into Chairman Mao's hands.
	Right into his lap.
	The increased invasion of Japan.
	And the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific, this is 1937, creates a huge problem for the nationalists.
	Because now the nationalists are faced with an even more powerful Japanese empire that's attacking them in Beijing, in Shanghai, across all of their power centers.
	People know, I believe, about the rape of Nanjing that happens during this period.
	The absolute destruction that was rained down on the Japanese.
	By the Japanese.
	And so at one point later, one of the warlords, because there's still warlords in this period, actually takes Chiang Kai-shek.
	Takes him and kidnaps him.
	Kidnaps him.
	And this is called the Xi'an Incident.
	We're here in 1936.
	He gets arrested by warlord Zhang Shui-liang.
	And this warlord says, In order to deal with Japanese aggression, in order to fight back against Japan, you must form an alliance with the CCP.
	You see, what Chiang Kai-shek didn't know was that this warlord had already cut a deal with Chairman Mao.
	Chairman Mao realized what happened with that Green Gang back in Shanghai during the purges, and he said, fine.
	If that's the way to work, I'm going to get there before them.
	So Mao starts making deals with the triads, with the black societies, with every warlord that he can.
	And here's what he says to them.
	He says, in the future, when I'm in charge of the country, you'll be given everything.
	And so Mao does enter this alliance.
	The CCP, the communists, form an alliance with the nationalists.
	And they say, here's what we're going to do.
	We'll start a second united front.
	And we'll fight Japan together.
	But of course, what does Mao really do?
	Because remember, Mao's forces now are mostly in the West.
	Whereas the Nationalist forces and the Japanese are mostly in the East.
	So the Communists commit to some limited engagements against the Japanese.
	But what really happens?
	Instead of Mao fighting the Japanese, he works with the peasants, He works with the Red Army.
	He keeps them mostly in the West.
	He lets the Nationalists fight Japan.
	And Mao even joked about this later.
	He said, I would have been crushed if I didn't have Japan invade and create a distraction that the Nationalists would have to face.
	So he could increase his armies, increase his forces in the West.
	Let the Nationalists take it on the chin.
	Let themselves become weakened.
	And then grow the CCP and grow the Red Army ever more powerful than he could.
	If Japan had never invaded, it's more than likely that the communists would have been stamped out in the 1930s after this long march.
	But, history is what it is.
	And so, because of that invasion of Japan, not only were the people of China subjugated to the horrors of Imperial Japan, the rape of Nanjing, but later it set forward the conditions for the CCP to come back. but later it set forward the conditions for the CCP
	And after Japan was knocked out of the war, after the war ended, thanks to the nuclear bombs, the atomic bombs by the United States, Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, it set the stage for Mao to make his comeback.
	Because immediately after World War II ended, The United States at first said, oh, we hope you guys can coexist peacefully.
	But even as far back as FDR, even, and then certainly under Truman, the communists that had completely infiltrated the United States State Department and the United States government at this point, they wanted the communists to win.
	They wanted China to fall.
	They saw what Mao was doing.
	They knew what Mao was doing.
	And in 1946, that civil war, Went hot again, and the CCP was poised to come back and win.
	The Communists won the Chinese Civil War.
	The Nationalists, the Republic of China, were forced to flee the country.
	And they later fled to the island that we now know today as Taiwan and established the Republic of China.
	On the way out, they hit the Treasury, hit the museums of Beijing.
	It took many, many things with them, Chiang Kai-shek and his regime, as the communists were going to come in and destroy everything, smash all of Chinese historical culture along with them.
	This was another part of Maoism because not only did the communist revolution murder, torture, and execute anyone who stood in their way, they also viewed history itself as their enemy.
	Now, two years after this happened, there was a speech given by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and he talked about the failed mission to prevent the Chinese civil war from taking place and the communist revolution from winning in China.
	Yeah.
	That mission had been headed by General George Marshall, famous George Marshall, on the Nobel Peace Prize.
	What did McCarthy have to say about that?
	McCarthy said the only way to explain why the U.S.
	fell from our position as the most powerful nation on earth at the end of World War II to a position of declared weakness by our leadership was because of a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.
	And specifically argued that General Wiedemeyer had prepared a plan that would have kept China a valued ally, but had been sabotaged, quote, only in treason can we find why evil genius thwarted and frustrated it.
	Specifically, that when Marshall was sent to China with secret State Department orders, the communists at that time were bottled up in two areas and were fighting a losing battle.
	But that because of those orders, the situation was radically changed in favor of the communists.
	Under those orders, as we now know, Marshall embargoed all arms and ammunition to our allies in China.
	He forced the opening of the Nationalist-held mountains into Manchuria to the end that the Chinese communists gained access to the mountains of captured Japanese equipment.
	Remember, the Japanese stronghold was in Northeast China in Manchuria.
	No need to tell the country how Marshall tried to force Shanghai Shek to form a partnership government with the communists.
	And so, were the communists allowed to win?
	Was Chairman Mao allowed to take China?
	Was this part of a deal that many have alleged took place between the highest levels of the United States government That actually started with FDR and then later was carried out by Truman and elements of the State Department.
	And you say, why?
	Why?
	What's in this for the United States?
	Well, it's not that it's in it for the United States.
	There's nothing in it for the United States.
	But what if there were a group of people that wanted to create a one world government?
	And what if there were a group of people that knew that in order to do that, you would have to create a deal.
	With the other superpower of the world at the time.
	And who was that?
	The Soviet Union.
	And the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, were our allies in World War II.
	But let's say you want to join with them.
	And let's say you want to create a one world government.
	You might call it something like, I don't know, the United Nations.
	But how would you get the Soviets to agree To take part in this program when they wouldn't have to.
	What could possibly be the dowry for such a dark marriage?
	Well, it's simple.
	You give them China.
	You give them a billion people to fall to communism and then you get their acquiescence.
	And we've seen many of this.
	We've seen much of this in declassified text, telegrams, declassified cables that have come out.
	Discussing these plans all the way back to FDR.
	Because there were many Americans that wanted communism to succeed, not just in China, but also across Europe.
	There's a reason that the US government funded and industrialized the Soviet Union for years and years prior to World War II, even prior to American involvement in World War II.
	And I'm just talking about Len Lease, but Len Lease of course goes on to be the funding That enables the Soviets to continue their fight.
	And so, going back to those days of the late 1940s, World War II ends.
	The Nationalists are left to dry.
	They're left to wither and rot on the vine by the United States and by the Allies.
	Meanwhile, the Communists, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, Continue fighting closer and closer.
	Millions of people are killed in this fighting.
	Over 2.5 million.
	Hundreds of thousands of people are starved out.
	Because remember, Chairman Mao once famously said, a revolution is not a dinner party.
	He didn't care how many people died.
	He gave orders for torture, execution, laid siege to cities where hundreds of thousands of people starved.
	And that was only A paltry sum compared to the millions that would later starve under Mao's rule.
	Because Mao wanted more than anything else, absolute power within China.
	And it didn't matter to him how many of his own people had to die so that he could get it.
	So under this situation, with the Communists being completely funded by the Soviet Union, the Nationalists getting no support whatsoever, the Japanese They've been destroyed, they've been defeated.
	What happens?
	October 1949.
	Beijing falls.
	Chairman Mao climbs atop the Tiananmen Square Gate and declares to the people of China and declares to the world the establishment of the People's Republic of China.
	The same government
	That's about it for episode one, but I want you to stay tuned because tomorrow in part two, we are going to talk all about the massacres that happened under Chairman Mao's rule, the purges, the recruitment of children, turning them against their own parents,
	Radicalizing them against their own families, their own schools, that culminated in mass suicide, murders, rapes, starvations.
	All of this taking place not in wartime, but in peacetime.
	Because this is the legacy of Chairman Mao.
	As his mind descended into degeneracy, so too Did China descend into chaos under heaven?
	Welcome to the first part.
	The China Files Part 2.
	Chaos Under Heaven.
	But after 1949, Chairman Mao was now the dictator of the entire country, the undisputed leader of the Chinese Communist Party.
	The man who, with a single word, could order executions, could order young girls taken to him, which he did many, many times, some as young as 13 and 14, to be brought up to his inner chambers, massive bed that he used to use.
	He had absolute power over the country.
	But the first thing that he began to do with that power was something called the agricultural reforms.
	And what was this?
	With the agricultural reforms and possibly in a response to his father and a response to the way that he talked about his father brutally treating him, brutally beating him and his brothers, the Chinese Communist Party went into every single peasant village and they found anyone who owned land.
	If you owned land, that land was taken for you.
	Peasant revenge.
	was the coin of the realm.
	Landlords, landowners, were shunned, publicly mocked, in some cases, brutally executed by the Chinese Communist Party.
	Millions of people died in this exercise, in this activity.
	These were called legitimate grievances against the landowners.
	It was a new class war Mao himself actually described it as this in 1950.
	Land reform in a population of over 300 million people is a vicious war.
	It is more arduous, more complex, more troublesome than crossing the Yangtze River because our troops are 260 million peasant soldiers.
	This is a war for land reform.
	This is the most hideous class war between peasants and landlords.
	It is a battle To the death.
	It's hard to tell how many landlords were actually systemically murdered by the Chinese Communist Party during this time.
	But it wasn't just landlords that were targeted.
	Because Mao soon realized that factory owners, factory managers, and academics all caused problems for him.
	And so Mao continued To go after all of them, but for the academics, Mao had a new idea because Mao came up with something called the Baihua Yingdong, the Hundred Flowers Campaign.
	And at one point in 1956, Chairman Mao encouraged intellectuals, academics, writers, he said, speak out, let a hundred flowers bloom, tell us the truth of what You believe our country has been up to since the founding of the People's Republic.
	Just go ahead and let us know and don't worry, nothing will happen to you.
	Well, it shouldn't begin to be very hard to tell you what happened to all those people.
	Because every single person who spoke out against Chairman Mao was locked up, discredited, They lost their jobs.
	They were forced into gulags and labor camps.
	They were sent away for re-education.
	Many of which were pushed to suicide or persecuted to the point where they decided to take their own lives rather than live through continued persecution at the hands of the authorities and at the hands of the party.
	Hundreds of thousands of leaders, leading intellectuals, professors, We're targeting what was called, and you're gonna love this, it was called the anti-right-wing movement.
	Because any criticism of the party was seen as right-wing extremism.
	And you're gonna hear that phrase over and over as we talk more about this.
	Because right-wing extremism, according to Chairman Mao, was the enemy of the revolution.
	And anyone who opposed him was a right-wing extremist.
	In fact, the historian Jun Chang wrote, it was a year before the intellectuals gained courage to respond to Mao's call.
	But in terms of the education system, there were bitter complaints about copying the Soviet Union, the fact that Marxist-Leninism was held up as orthodox doctrine to be accepted without question, wider social criticism focused on the authoritarian role and various abuses of privilege of the new political elites.
	Because the new elites were simply the people that Mao put into power.
	But Mao didn't care.
	Mao was looking to make a list of enemies.
	And for every person who came out, they were criticized, they were persecuted, many of whom were later sent to the farms themselves.
	They said, if you don't understand the importance of the peasantry, you must be sent down.
	Xia Fang.
	This happened in the 1950s and 60s.
	These intellectuals were sent to work on farms themselves as indentured servants and slaves.
	And there's another group that was persecuted.
	The persecution of them began under this time.
	It wasn't as intense as it would later become during the Cultural Revolution.
	But that was the church.
	Christianity in China began to be persecuted.
	Churches were closed.
	Missionaries were forced out.
	You didn't yet have the mass killings of priests And nuns, the rapes, that would come later.
	But during this period, the Chinese Communist Party, like all communist parties, understood that only one ideology could be allowed to operate.
	And so any church that remained in China, any individual congregation, had to be forced, the priests themselves had to swear allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party, or they too would be purged.
	They too would be sent to the countryside, and if they were a foreigner, be deported from the country, or even worse.
	Because in a communist revolution, they always come for the priests first.
	They always come for the people of God.
	Because for communism to take hold and take root, there cannot be any higher power than the party, which is always officially atheist.
	They smash God, they take him out of the public square, and they appoint themselves and the revolution, the new morality.
	Because as we're going to learn, the revolution never ends.
	As the 10 year mark of the People's Republic was rapidly approaching, Mao became impatient.
	Mao was upset because utopia had not yet been reached.
	Millions had been killed.
	Millions more had been deported.
	Millions more had been taken out of their positions of power and sent to serve as peasants.
	The peasants then had been placed in charge of the farms, in charge of the factories, in charge of industrial output, and yet nothing seemed to be working.
	Mao then decided that industrial manufacturing and agricultural growth needed to move, quote, faster, better, and cheaper.
	And so Mao came up with a new policy, a new plan that he called the Great Leap Forward.
	The Great Leap Forward had two objectives.
	The first was to industrialize the society, industrialize the economy in order to catch up with the West.
	The second was to transform China into a collectivized society where full socialism would be achieved.
	This was done through collective communes.
	Where those massive farms that we talked about earlier would no longer be owned by any one individual.
	They'd be owned by the state.
	They'd be owned by the party.
	Where you wouldn't even live in your own home anymore.
	You would live in dormitories.
	You would live in blocks.
	You wouldn't make your own food.
	No, you'd be served food at cafeterias and canteens.
	You'd be given the ability to have a collective meal.
	You would have collective work, collective education, collective life.
	You would live at the beck and call of the state.
	Now the Great Leap Forward, this was announced by Mao.
	The party was meeting in Nanjing in the South.
	And Mao said, we need to follow a different path than the Soviet Union.
	We need to figure out a way to organize all peasant labor, eliminate waste, inefficiency.
	And of course, Mao realized that the only one to be able to direct all of this, of course, would be Chairman Mao himself.
	And so they came up with a new jingle called Communism is paradise, and the people's communes are the way to get there.
	Private property was confiscated.
	Land, farm buildings, tools, livestock, all of it was confiscated by the government, even private homes.
	Philip Short, who was a historian, wrote, officially, everyone was supposed to have at least six hours sleep every day.
	But some brigades boasted of working up to four or five days without stopping.
	Now, Mao was also obsessed with steel.
	And Mao said, we need to find ways to make more.
	China has to make more steel and make it faster.
	So Mao decided to come up with a new policy called backyard furnaces because we needed to take the old iron.
	Remember the old, the plowshares, we needed more steel plowshares.
	And so what was the best way to do this?
	Well, the Soviet Union had their massive smelteries, but not in China.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	In China, they decided to have backyard furnaces.
	So all farmers and anyone in China who owned iron, you were then ordered by Chairman Mao to go into your backyard with your hammers, your scythe, your equipment, and to smelt all of it down in your backyard furnaces.
	All farm equipment in China was melted.
	Even household implements, cooking utensils, ladles, pots, woks, pans, everything smelted down.
	Now, did this lead to a new birth of a bountiful harvest for China?
	Did these massive communist policies lead to the greatest export and bountiful harvest that we've ever seen in the world?
	No.
	Unfortunately not.
	Because unfortunately for us, the same way that this was tried under Trofim Lysenko, the founder of Lysenkoism, complete pseudoscience in the Soviet Union, this led to the greatest mass humanitarian crisis in world history.
	Tens of millions of people starved to death.
	Some estimates say it was as high as 47 million, some estimates say it's as high as 60 million.
	There's an incredible book called Hungry Ghosts that I urge you to read, but I don't urge you to read it on an empty stomach.
	Excuse me, I do urge you to read it on an empty stomach.
	Because it shows the abject horror that the people of China, the Laobai Xing, had to live through under the Great Leap Forward, and what they call the Great Famine.
	Even today they call it the three years of famine, though of course in official propaganda they say it was due to natural disasters.
	The food shortages got so bad, got so critical, that peasants were eating things like sawdust, leather, seeds, animal manure.
	In Sichuan province there are reports of peasants eating soil itself, dogs, cats, rice, Mice, insects, dead or alive.
	Malnutrition spread throughout all of China.
	And there was something else that spread throughout China that began to rear its head.
	Cannibalism.
	Because people would see their neighbors die and they would say, If this flesh can be a way for us to live, then why shouldn't we?
	Sometimes, and there are reports of this happening to families eating their own family members.
	Parents, siblings, even in some cases children.
	Child abandonment, child selling, prostitution.
	In some cases there are even stories of parents killing their own children which they considered an act of mercy rather than allow them to starve.
	All of this in Chairman Mao's quest for a communist utopia.
	His quest to make everything equal under heaven.
	His quest to right the wrongs of a capitalist Right-wing imperialist society.
	Parents forced to kill their own children.
	People eating their own neighbors.
	These stories, by the way, you won't find them in a Hollywood movie.
	You won't find them anywhere in China.
	Because Hollywood is terrified to tell the truth of what happened in China under Chairman Mao.
	They're terrified to tell the truth of the Chinese Communist Party to this very day.
	The most horrific humanitarian crisis on the planet.
	50 million, 60 million people dead in peacetime.
	And there isn't a single movie about it.
	Why do you suppose that is?
	So the Great Leap Forward ended in disaster.
	Mass starvation, tens of millions killed.
	Many of the other senior leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, people like Deng Xiaoping, people like Liu Xiaoqi, realized that they had to come up with a new plan.
	And so they went to Chairman Mao and they said, let us take over economic reforms.
	We can work on this.
	We can make things better.
	We can set things right.
	And initially, Chairman Mao said, fine, go ahead.
	But then something happened.
	As Deng Xiaoping and Liu Xiaoqi and the other individuals were running these new reforms in China, Mao became very upset because he saw themselves as being successful and they were winning over the people.
	But Mao didn't like that one bit.
	He didn't want anyone To have that kind of connection with the people other than him.
	But the problem was, for the people that had lived through the Great Leap Forward, the people who understood the years of famine, they understood who was to blame, and they'd already been swung.
	So anyone who was over 18 understood that it was Chairman Mao's issue.
	So Chairman Mao came up with a new solution.
	He decided that people like Deng Xiaoping and people like Liu Xiaoqi, these other party leaders, or anyone who opposed his rule, his unquestioned rule, must then be eliminated and purged.
	And Mao launched something in 1966.
	That can only be referred to as a revolution against his own revolution.
	And he used the youth in order to do this.
	He began to hold massive stadium-filled speeches, broadcasts across the news, across everywhere.
	Speeches from Tiananmen Gate and Tiananmen Square.
	And he brought these youth to him, these new cadres that he referred to as the Red Guards.
	And the Red Guard brigades were then formed in every city, in every province, from the cities of the East to the deserts of the West, to the countryside, to the South.
	And Mao asked for only one thing, unquestioned loyalty to himself and unquestioned loyalty to the revolution.
	If you were accused of anti-revolutionary thought, As the brigades of thousands of Red Guards marched up and down the streets, they would go onto buses, and they always held up Mal's Little Red Book, and they would ask you to make sure that you had your copy of Mal's Little Red Book on you.
	They might even ask you to quote from it, and if you couldn't finish the quote they started on the bus, you'd be hauled off and sent to your struggle session.
	If you were accused at school, if you were accused at work, Of uttering anti-revolutionary thought, the persecution began.
	Teachers would throw themselves out of buildings and kill themselves rather than face the struggle sessions.
	Massive soccer stadiums where people were placed with placards around their necks and forced to self-incriminate, forced to stand there and be persecuted by the people, spat upon, have things thrown at them, in some cases executed.
	Some cases not.
	The Red Guards soon became too powerful for anyone to control and the cult of Mao became so large that everyone in the country had to go with it.
	Churches at this point were completely destroyed.
	Anything attached to the past or attached to another country became a target of attack.
	A new vector of destruction.
	You had to prove your worth.
	You had to prove your fervor, your revolutionary fervor to Chairman Mao.
	People were dug up.
	Old emperors were dug up.
	And their bodies were desecrated.
	Graveyards were smashed.
	Things that may bear a striking similarity to things that you saw in the United States in 2020.
	As statues were smashed, language itself was twisted.
	And the enemies of Chairman Mao were purged, blacklisted, in many cases persecuted and murdered.
	Even one individual, Lin Biao, who had been the head of the Red Army during the Chinese Civil War, during the war against the Nationalists, Lin Biao, who had always supported Chairman Mao.
	He was the Minister of Defense.
	Even he was accused because Mao was becoming crazier and crazier as he lost his mind.
	Many people thought that he had even had syphilis.
	And it's going back to say that some of his doctors have confirmed this.
	That Mao thought that Lin Biao was working against him.
	And there's been new information that's come out in years since that Lin Biao may have been having secret discussions with the nationalists, with the Republic of China back down in Taiwan.
	As to say, we need to do something about Mao.
	We need to form a new government.
	This has been a complete disaster.
	Mao found out what was going on.
	And Lin Biao, and took his entire family, nine people, and they ran to an airplane, private airplane, a Hawker Siddeley Trident.
	They took off from Beijing.
	Or excuse me, they took off from Hebei province.
	They tried to flow up to the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union didn't want issues with Mao.
	They tried to fly back down to Taiwan, but they realized that they ran out of fuel.
	They crashed over Mongolia.
	Everyone, Lin Biao's entire family, was killed.
	Even someone who had been a massive supporter of Mao himself and his whole family died because Mao had lost his entire mind.
	And he was accusing everyone of being against him.
	It's in these final years that Nixon and Kissinger made their trips over.
	They met with Mao.
	Mao made a series of crazy statements to both of them.
	And then Mao in 1976 finally died.
	His body was embalmed.
	Believe it or not, Mao's body is still on public display to this very day in Tiananmen Square.
	And you can go visit his mausoleum.
	But if you want to go visit the Mao mausoleum, you better plan the whole day for it.
	Because the line to get in is hours and hours long.
	There ain't no fast pass like Disney World.
	Because even to this day, because of the power of propaganda, people wait in the thousands to see the body.
	of the Great Helmsman Chairman Mao.
	Join with us tomorrow as we'll talk about what happened next.
	To the regime, Mao dies.
	Deng Xiaoping is able to take over.
	There is an increase.
	There are reforms in economics and politics, but it culminates in something called the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the People's Dynasty of Horror.
	Chairman Mao himself, the Great Helmsman, passes away.
	His body is later put on display at the Mausoleum.
	And a new leader emerges to become the paramount Supreme Leader of the Party, the Supreme Leader of China, even though he never takes the title himself officially.
	And that man is the minuscule Deng Xiaoping.
	Now, Deng Xiaoping, he had been around in the CCP from the early days.
	He was a member of that long march.
	He fought with the Red Army.
	But one thing that was different between Deng Xiaoping and Mao, as there were many differences between Deng Xiaoping and Mao, was that Deng Xiaoping had had foreign experiences as a young man.
	Chairman Mao only ever left China once that we know of in order to go to Moscow to attend a meeting with Joseph Stalin in the 1940s.
	Deng Xiaoping, on the other hand, had spent time overseas.
	These.
	Deng Xiaoping, in his very early years, had an opportunity to travel to France as an overseas worker.
	In fact, many Chinese traveled overseas as workers in the late 1800s, of course, famously building the railroad in the United States, the Transcontinental Railroad, and then in other chances he had, he worked in France.
	And so at 16 years old, Deng Xiaoping traveled steerage class on a working ship to France as an overseas worker, where he worked in a steel factory, an iron factory.
	He was given a job as a fitter.
	And actually years later, during the Cultural Revolution, when he himself was purged by Mao and by the party, he was sent to a factory.
	This is 50 years later.
	He's sent to a factory to work yet again as a fitter.
	And it turns out that he still knew trade.
	He was still a master of the craft.
	So Deng Xiaoping has this European background.
	He studied in France for a little bit, at least in middle school that we know of.
	And then he then comes in.
	He's one of the people that during the Great Leap Forward, the party looked to, and he had risen through the ranks.
	And they looked to him to establish some kind of economic reform, to find some kind of way to peel back from the hardline communism and hardline commune policies of Chairman Mao that led to the mass starvation.
	So Deng Xiaoping began injecting market reforms and introducing market reforms, both after the Great Leap Forward and then later when Mao died and Deng Xiaoping became really his successor.
	That's when he introduced a new policy into China.
	He called it reform and opening up.
	And essentially what he did, now keep in mind, this is after the meeting with Nixon, after the meeting with Kissinger, Zhou Enlai is still around.
	He's one of the premiers of China.
	But Deng Xiaoping starts opening China to the West, and he allows specifically foreign direct investment to come into China, realizing that communism has been a failure in terms of economics, but then not wanting to lose power over the entire country from a political perspective.
	And so we knew he had to say something about Chairman Mao, and there's a famous saying from Deng Xiaoping, He's famous for being a pragmatist.
	And one of his famous sayings about Chairman Mao, and they asked him, was Mao good, was Mao bad?
	Of course, he knew that he had to acknowledge the failures of Chairman Mao, but he also had to find a way to maintain Chairman Mao's standing as the leader of China, the leader of the CCP, really the initial, if not formal founder, but certainly the original main leader.
	And so Deng Xiaoping comes up with a statement of saying, Mao was seven parts good, three parts bad.
	And that's still essentially the official narrative from the party when it goes to Chairman Mao.
	And then when Mao had passed away and Deng started introducing these market reforms into China, they asked him about this once and they said, you know, isn't this a form of capitalism?
	Isn't this the opposite of communism?
	What are you doing?
	And later on, this system is known as socialism with Chinese characteristics.
	And Deng responds, it doesn't matter if a cat is white or black.
	It only matters if the cat catches mice.
	And so again, The same type of pragmatism that you would see as opposed to the ideological dogmatism of Chairman Mao, whereas Deng Xiaoping wanted China to become richer, wanted the party to become more powerful.
	But here's the difference.
	Here's the difference between him and, say, a Khrushchev.
	Here's the difference between him and a Gorbachev, was that Deng never wanted the party to lose power.
	And so, as the country and as the CCP opened up more and reformed more, the 1970s rolled into the 1980s.
	And throughout the 1980s, remember, the USSR at this point, it's beginning to crack.
	The Communist Bloc is beginning to open.
	Thaws are happening between first, obviously, between the CCP and the United States, but then also between the Warsaw Nations.
	Berlin Wall.
	More and more protests.
	All throughout the 1980s, Reagan becomes president.
	Reagan and Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, they're fighting.
	They're going behind the Berlin Wall.
	Pope John Paul II goes to Poland, holds massive rallies.
	Worldwide communism is beginning to fall.
	And the power of communism over these areas is beginning to weaken.
	All of this comes to a head.
	And at the same time, Deng Xiaoping, he's out there preaching reform, opening up reform, reform, reform.
	Well, students and youth throughout China start hearing this and they say, we don't just want economic reform.
	We want political reform.
	We want social reform.
	We want the freedoms that we've seen in the West.
	We want the freedoms that we've seen in the United States.
	We want the freedoms that are being denied to us.
	And this sparks off a movement as well.
	And in fact, some party leaders of the CCP back this new movement of political reform.
	One of those leaders ends up passing away and a funeral is held for him in a place called Tiananmen Square in April of 1989.
	And the students flooded the square.
	They stayed there for months.
	So it's April, 1989.
	There's massive movement for social change across all of China, every major city.
	And one party leader in particular, not Deng Xiaoping, but a pretty high leader named Hu Yaobang is championing these reforms.
	But Deng Xiaoping and the hardliners, the long marchers, they don't want this.
	They don't want any social reform.
	They don't want any reform at all like this because they want the party to always be the unchallenged head of all of China.
	So Hu Yaobang is forced to resign, but not long after his forced resignation, he suffers a heart attack and dies.
	Many of his supporters, many of the students wonder, could he have been killed?
	Could something have happened to him, like something happened to Lin Biao?
	What's really going on?
	So those students flood, not just Tiananmen Square, but Shanghai, Chongqing, hundreds of thousands in Hong Kong, all over China.
	Remember, Hong Kong, by the way, had not been under Chinese rule at this time, not under the CCP rule at this time.
	It was still under British rule.
	Hong Kong never went communist.
	Hong Kong was always a British enclave, the same way that Taiwan never became communist because it was always under the Nationalists after 1949.
	So you have to remember this.
	Hong Kong and Taiwan Always stayed outside of Communist China till later on with Hong Kong.
	So, here we are.
	The students don't leave Tiananmen Square.
	The protests get bigger and bigger.
	They go on for weeks.
	The weeks turn to months.
	Now it's June, and it's still going on.
	And everybody remembers what happened.
	June 4th, 1989.
	The tanks rolled in full view of Western cameras because Deng Xiaoping and the leaders of the CCP saw a potential for a new civil war and a new revolution on their hands.
	And they themselves knew, as revolutionaries, what would happen if they allowed that movement to get off the ground.
	And so instead of giving it space, they crushed it and they killed Thousands of students, workers, and everyone else in that square of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which is what Tiananmen means.
	The same gate where Chairman Mao, just 40 years before, exactly 40 years before, had commemorated the founding of the People's Republic of China.
	But in fact, at this point, their People's Republic had just become a new dynasty.
	A sort of red dynasty.
	One that was not willing to relinquish power to anyone.
	Now an interesting story about all of this.
	Premier Zhao Ziyang.
	So CCP Premier Zhao Ziyang at this point actually became a supporter of the students.
	went down into the protest himself as a high-ranking member of the party and showed support to them, showed respect, listened to them.
	And for this, Zhao Ziyang was purged, of course, in the midst of these protests.
	However, because of his background, because of who he was, because of his legal service to the CCP in the past, and because he had so many internal supporters, he was put on house arrest.
	He was not executed.
	Zhao Ziyang spent the rest of his life recording 30 audio tapes that were then smuggled out of his house between 1999 and 2000.
	He actually had children's cassette tapes for his kids on an old audio player.
	And he would record over them with a little battery operated radio that he had at his house.
	And the CCP guards never noticed what he was doing in there.
	What was he actually doing?
	He was secretly recording his memoirs.
	He was secretly recording what actually happened inside the CCP just prior to Tiananmen Square, as well as his take on everything that had gone on prior to it.
	He said in terms of that, I refused to become the general secretary who mobilized the military to crack down on students.
	In the final chapter of the book, which was later released in 2009 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, Zhao Ziyang praised the Western system of parliamentary democracy and said that it is the only way that China could solve its problems of corruption and a growing gap between the rich and the poor.
	On Tiananmen Square, he said, By insisting on my view of the student demonstrations and refusing to accept the decision to crack down with force, I knew what the consequences would be and what the treatment I would receive.
	I knew that if I persistently upheld my view, I would be ultimately compelled to step down.
	On the night of June 3rd, when sitting in the courtyard with my family, I heard intense gunfire.
	A tragedy to shock the world had not been averted.
	And what was happening, after all?
	That's one of the only acknowledgements that's ever come out of a high-ranking CCP official actually admitting that the Tiananmen Square massacre did take place.
	And he had to smuggle it out through his kids, his grandkids, cassette tapes.
	On Deng Xiaoping, he wrote, Deng has always stood out among the party elders as one who emphasized the means of dictatorship.
	He often reminded people of its usefulness.
	And so people need to understand that when you look at Deng Xiaoping, when you look at these years of reform and opening up in China, that doesn't mean they were willing to relinquish power.
	Far from it.
	Because this still was the CCP.
	Now the difference between Tiananmen Square and what happened with the Berlin Wall and what happened in Moscow was that in Moscow the soldiers refused to fire on their own citizens, on their own people.
	The People's Liberation Army, which is what the Red Army had become to be known as, they brought in units from outside Beijing.
	They told them that the whole thing was a Western plot and that they were there to take down China and that the only way to save China was to destroy the students and destroy the movement where it stood.
	And that's exactly what they did.
	But that image of the tank man that did come out, Cover Time Magazine, that led protesters and gave them hope.
	And it sent hope behind the Berlin Wall to East Germany, to Poland, to Russia, all over the communist world.
	And it was following the events of Tiananmen Square that communism itself fell across the entire globe.
	So after Tiananmen Square, the bloody cobblestone streets, communism is withering and dying across the world.
	But that's not what happens in China.
	No, not at all.
	Because just one month after the Tiananmen Square massacre, the president of the United States at the time, George H.W. Bush, sends his national security advisor, General Scowcroft, on a secret mission to China. - Yeah.
	Now George H.W.
	Bush, prior to becoming president, had been the CIA director.
	But prior to that, he had also been America's special envoy to China.
	It's true.
	And he'd always had big plans for China.
	He saw what was going on in the 1970s, and he looked at it through the lens of business.
	And realized.
	Why knock over the Chinese Communist Party?
	When you could make them make a deal.
	Because the United States in the Western system, the Western world could have destroyed the CCP at that instant.
	They had no power.
	We could have cut off trade.
	We could have done everything that we did to Russia.
	When they invaded Ukraine and China would have been finished, or at least the CCP would have been finished.
	They've been done for.
	But no.
	Because what George H.W. Bush and his successor Bill Clinton did throughout the 1990s was to form a new deal with the CCP.
	A secret pact.
	The CCP would continue opening up and they would continue to be the leaders of China and the West would support them the same way the West had supported the USSR in its early days and helped to industrialize the nation.
	The West would continue to industrialize China through their finances, through foreign direct investment, and in exchange, they would provide slave labor.
	In exchange, Western firms would be allowed to supply the capital, supply the intellectual property, but the goods that would be made would be made for slave wages and sent all around the world.
	This was the birth of a system that today we call globalism.
	Globalism was born from the bloody cobblestones of Tiananmen Square.
	This is what the United States elites did as a response here.
	Now there were a few things that the CCP asked for in return.
	One of which was tough.
	And it wasn't directly to Washington they asked for this.
	It was to London.
	Because remember before I was talking about Hong Kong.
	That massive, powerful, sprawling metropolis.
	It's actually a series of islands.
	At the mouth of the Pearl River.
	The British had started.
	It had been nothing before the British came.
	But Deng Xiaoping wanted it back.
	He said, if we're going to get this thing done, if we're going to get this whole deal done, we want it back.
	And they had already been in negotiations even before Tiananmen Square for this to happen.
	Deng Xiaoping said, we want to continue the negotiations.
	We want it back.
	And there were people who even said at the time that because Hong Kong had stayed capitalist throughout its entire existence, never gone communist, that perhaps if Hong Kong were introduced, reintroduced to China, they called it one country, two systems under the one country, two systems model, that all of China would open up, that China would become democratic that all of China would open up, that China would become democratic and capitalist and everything would
	When in fact, it was the exact opposite that happened.
	The West handed over Hong Kong, which the West had built.
	And where are we now?
	Thank you.
	Hong Kong has been subjugated.
	Hong Kong's freedoms have been stolen.
	People trampled in the streets.
	Protesters disappeared.
	And the CCP has taken complete control and reneged on every single deal they made with the West.
	Because understand, when they make a deal with the West, it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
	Because the CCP doesn't see Westerners as people.
	They see them as lesser.
	They see them as merely a means to an end.
	And the CCP teaches that the hundred years between the Opium War of 1949 to the founding, excuse me, the Opium War of 1849, all the way up to the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, that was called the Century of Humiliation.
	And that is why now when the CCP has their target set on 2049, they want the following century to be the century of CCP ascendance.
	Not just in China, but around the entire world.
	And so Deng Xiaoping passes away in February of 97, doesn't actually get to see it.
	But on July 1st,
	1997 British flag goes down on Hong Kong And the CCP's flag goes up a CCP garrison Is then formed and stood up the People's Liberation Army Right down in Admiralty in central Hong Kong The Chinese Navy begins patrolling the waters they take sovereignty of Hong Kong
	And then their eyes turned towards Taiwan and they say they want that back too.
	Even though it had never been part of the CCP.
	It had never been part of CCP control.
	But this was the deal.
	The deal was the West and Western elites wanted to continue to maintain their slave wages and these deals so that cheap TVs, big screens could be sent over.
	Manufacturing would be outsourced to China.
	Who cares what happens to Detroit?
	Who cares what happens to the Midwest?
	Who cares what happens to the South?
	We're all going to be rich.
	And sure, we'll let the CCP, we'll make them rich as well.
	Doesn't matter.
	Because at the end of the day, that's all we care about is selling products to gullible, stupid Westerners with their consumer mindsets.
	And so the CCP in a sense abandons communism, at least in terms of economic principles, but they maintain power and they came up with a new strategy.
	And the new strategy would be to join with the West to build a global empire.
	But then once the West had built it, the CCP would take over.
	And just such a man, With that ambition and vision in mind, came and took over the CCP in the 2000s.
	His name is Xi Jinping.
	Xi Jinping was born in 1953.
	And interestingly enough, Xi Jinping was not raised in Beijing.
	He was not raised in a big city.
	Now Xi Jinping's father had himself been A member of Mao's early Chinese Communist Party.
	He was one of Mao's closest lieutenants.
	In fact, Xi Jinping's father, if you remember all the way back in part one, when I talked about that long march, that they left and then joined up with the communists in the West after being defeated by the nationalists, where they bided their time.
	Xi Jinping's father was the one who initially set up that base out in the West.
	That Mao Zedong fled to.
	So this was a guy who was in close standing with Mao.
	However, during the Cultural Revolution, when all of this went down, and even during the Great Leap Forward, Xi's father had fell out of favor, the same way that so many other communist leaders fell out of favor.
	And he and his family, including his 10-year-old son, were sent to the countryside.
	He was purged.
	And so Xi Jinping didn't grow up in Beijing, didn't grow up as the son of some great leader.
	In fact, he grew up in the rural countryside, working as one of the laborers, one of the intellectuals who were sent down.
	During the Cultural Revolution, when the Red Guards came around, he wasn't even allowed to join because of his father's questionable behavior.
	So Xi Jinping could have been one of these red guards, but no.
	In fact, his father had been purged.
	The persecution of Xi Jinping's father and his family.
	Xi Jinping had been one of seven, by the way.
	It was so great that Xi Jinping's older sister even committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution.
	And we talked before about how so many people committed suicide during this era.
	Because of these persecutions and the struggle sessions.
	But it seems though Xi Jinping took a separate kind of guidance and a separate type of highlight away.
	A different learning from the lessons of the Cultural Revolution.
	Because he didn't learn that this is not the way to run a country.
	Instead, he learned That the way to gain power was to purge your enemies.
	And this is exactly what he would do on his way up the food chain.
	Now when Deng Xiaoping came back into power, one thing that Deng Xiaoping did in order to unify the party was to go back and rehabilitate all of the old cadres that had been kicked out under Mao.
	So Xi Jinping's father gets rehabilitated, he's essentially exonerated of his quote-unquote
	Anti-revolutionary stances and crimes and and all the other insane struggle session things they put him through And Xi Jinping joins the party in full at this point begins moving up the ranks He continues this under chairman Jiang Zemin through the 1990s and then chairman Hu Jintao late 90s early 2000s and at one point Xi Jinping actually becomes the chairman
	of Shanghai itself, one of the major economic cities, one of the major economic drivers in all of Southern China.
	He becomes chairman of Shanghai, in fact, when I was living in Shanghai.
	So I lived in Shanghai from 2007 to 2008.
	At that time, the general secretary, which is what they call the chairman of the city, was Xi Jinping.
	And at one point in the summer of 2008, right before the Olympics started, I always remember the date for the Olympics, 8-8-0-8, right?
	But prior to that, when the Shanghai World Expo was being planned, in downtown Shanghai, they had a facility by the river, Pudong River.
	Had the opportunity to visit there, and there were some American clients I was working with to bring them in, bring in their representation.
	And I saw, by the way, every time we brought American clients to China, How much they love the China model.
	So we're taking them around and I'm a young staffer on the project.
	And the day that we go over for our meeting, turns out the local party secretary, the local chairman of the city is also there.
	Xi Jinping with his massive entourage.
	So she's there and he stands about six feet tall, which is very tall over in China.
	Head and shoulders above everyone in the room.
	He was wearing a coat over the shoulder.
	And you could see with his massive entourage around him, everybody knew.
	This guy was the boss.
	Now we were actually told to stay back in one room while the entourage was walking by, but he did take a moment to peek in.
	And I remember seeing him and going, man, this guy's like the Chinese Tony Soprano.
	You could see the deference to him.
	You could see the way that he oozed power throughout the room.
	You could see the way that he just floated throughout every interaction with every person, making way for him, taking their hand, extending it.
	We knew that Xi Jinping was going to go far at that point when he was chairman of the party.
	And he was in there cleaning up what he called corruption.
	What was he really doing?
	He was taking out rivals.
	In this case, it was rivals who were loyal to Jiang Zemin, who had been the earlier leader of the Shanghai faction of the party.
	CCP split into two factions, Beijing and Shanghai.
	Doesn't necessarily mean, though, that if you are the Shanghai chairman, that you're always going to be loyal to Shanghai.
	And that's what happened with Xi Jinping.
	He was there cleaning up rivals.
	He was there purging people.
	And to the populace, to the Laobai Xing, he says, Well, I'm cleaning up corruption.
	I'm helping China.
	And he made sure that every single person that he purged, every single official that was taken down, that their crimes were broadcast throughout the entire city.
	They hung newspapers up at local parks, showing headlines, showing the arrest, showing all of it.
	You see, because Xi Jinping had learned from what had happened to his father.
	He learned that by taking down your enemies, So, Xi Jinping had learned that from an early age, purging your enemies was a path to power.
	He was taught that lesson by Chairman Mao himself, as Chairman Mao used it to solidify power during the Cultural Revolution.
	He used it to Xi's own family.
	Sister committed suicide.
	Father had been purged.
	He himself was forced to work in the countryside.
	And so, a hallmark Of Xi's rule over the CCP has been what he calls anti-corruption campaigns, not just during his time in Shanghai, but even during his time as chairman.
	And he has systematically gone after so many rivals and purged so many potential detractors from this Jiang Zemin faction, from the Shanghai faction, the faction that could have possibly have opposed him.
	He's actually created a reality TV show of it so that These purges, the trials, the incriminations, well, they're not done in front of stadiums anymore because you don't need that.
	Now you've got TV.
	Now you don't need a massive stadium.
	You can put it right on CCTV and broadcast it to the entire country.
	And guess what?
	It's now the number one show in China.
	And it's been that way for years.
	The anti-corruption show hosted by Xi Jinping.
	And so, these officials go on and admit their own crimes.
	But there's no greater takedown, there's been no greater purge of Xi Jinping's career than that of Bo Xilai.
	And who was Bo Xilai?
	Well, if you don't know, it's because Xi Jinping and his guys stopped him.
	At one point, Bo Xilai was poised to be the next leader of the party.
	He was running an economic powerhouse in central China called Chongqing.
	He oversaw the building of the Three Gorges Dam, one of the biggest super projects, mega projects in all of China, actually damming and building a hydroelectric plant on the Yangtze River.
	And then Bo Xilai had started his own cult of personality.
	He started dressing like Chairman Mao.
	He started bringing back the old communist songs.
	People were falling in love with him.
	But the problem for Bo Xilai was that Xi Jinping and his faction wanted to find out what was going on and stop him.
	Because he had been close to Jiang Zemin and they didn't want him anywhere near the halls of power, whether in Beijing and certainly not as the next party chairman.
	And so they did whatever they could to find dirt on Bo Xilai.
	And it turns out that it wasn't just typical corruption.
	It wasn't just your typical bribery.
	Most elites of the CCP were involved in that.
	They were all getting rich.
	But no, there was another problem with Bo Xilai because he flew a little bit too close to his son.
	And in fact, not just he flew too close to his son, his wife did.
	On the morning of November 14th, 2011, A British citizen named Neil Heywood was found dead in a hotel room in Chongqing.
	Yeah, that's right.
	The same Chongqing where Bo Xilai was leader.
	Now, we were told at one point that he died from alcohol overconsumption.
	People die all the time.
	All sorts of accidents happen in China, right?
	It is what it is.
	Drinking a little too much had a bit of a bender.
	But here's the thing.
	It turns out that Neil Heywood had been in a, shall we say, close relationship with Bo Xilai's wife, Gu Kailai.
	He had helped their son earn admission to a school in England, Fancy Boarding School.
	He had also helped the family launder money.
	Huge, massive sums of money.
	Hundreds of millions of dollars outside of the country.
	Now, there was a business dispute.
	I'm not exactly sure what it was, but he wanted more money.
	He wanted more than they were willing to give.
	And so what happened?
	Gu Kai Lai, the wife, she poisons Neil Heywood.
	She kills him.
	Now, normally, if some party member does this, their wife does this, it gets cleaned up.
	The party takes care of things like this.
	Why do we know about this one?
	Well, because here's the problem with all of that.
	You see, because the police chief of Chongqing, the guy whose job it was to clean up the murders, he himself was under surveillance.
	He himself So he went and took the tapes.
	And he had tapes of the entire thing.
	And he had receipts on Bo Xilai.
	Now he first tried to bring this to the U.S.
	Consulate.
	This is when Barack Obama was in power.
	The U.S.
	Consulate didn't really do anything for him.
	However, those tapes then found their way into the higher levels of the party and into the supporters of Xi Jinping.
	Bo Xilai and his wife were arrested, were removed from every position that they held.
	Bo Xilai himself was sentenced to life in prison.
	Who they later determined had actually put poison in this British businessman's drink, was sentenced to death.
	And believe me, the death penalty is still very, very much in favor in Communist China, even to this day.
	Xi Jinping orchestrated the receipt collection, the takedown, and the public disgracing of his largest possible rival.
	And then one year later, stands up at the Chinese National Congress and is announced that he will be the undisputed next chairman of the CCP.
	And that's 2012.
	By 2015, a few years into his rule, he decided to go ahead back to old Gu, to the old wife and say, you know what?
	I'm going to go ahead and commute your sentence.
	We're not going to carry this out.
	We're not going to execute you anymore.
	We're going to give you life in prison where you and your husband can watch me live out the life that you thought that you were going to have.
	And we're going to fill this prison with every single friend and ally you thought you had in the party across the entire country.
	That's how Xi Jinping came to power.
	So at this point, fast forward, it's 10 years later.
	Xi Jinping, undisputed chairman of the CCP, changes the internal party constitution, does away with those pesky 10-year deals.
	No.
	He's going to be a leader for life.
	He then begins purging every leader of the military that's not loyal to him, every leader of the judiciary, the legal system.
	He takes over.
	And he completely takes over the party.
	And here's something that You need to understand what's very different between China and the United States is that the military itself, the People's Liberation Army, is directly subservient to the Chinese Communist Party, to the CCP and the Central Military Commission.
	The generals, the admirals, they all work directly for Xi Jinping, not the other way around.
	There's no democratic rule or anything like that, like you might see in the West.
	Not at all.
	And Xi Jinping showed an ambition that you haven't seen from chairman of the party really since Mao.
	But Xi's ambition was not communist in the doctrinal sense.
	He came up with a new strategy.
	New strategy for rule across not just China, But for the rise of the CCP because he was focused like a laser on 2049.
	The 100 year leap forward of China.
	And he came up with a new strategy.
	He called it Yi Dai Yi Lu.
	One belt, one road.
	And began working diligently with countries all around the world.
	Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa South America He began going around making deals It's called debt trap diplomacy With third world nations and saying we'll give you loans.
	We'll build you roads.
	We'll build you railroads.
	We'll build you airports We'll build you military facilities You just have to let us use them.
	You just have to give us your rare earth elements He's currently now making deals with Saudi Arabia with Iran for oil People may have heard of the massive concentration camps and lockdowns in Xinjiang, the Uyghur region.
	But you have to look at this on the map to understand the importance of it.
	Because what is directly across the Xinjiang region?
	Xinjiang is just north of Tibet, another area subjugated by the CCP.
	But Xinjiang directly borders the Middle East.
	And the CCP is building roads, pipelines and railroads down through Pakistan.
	They call it the economic corridor all the way to the Persian Gulf so that they can get their oil.
	They're building more roads and pipelines through Burma so that they can get to the Indian Ocean.
	And in fact, they're encircling their one major adversary.
	In Asia, India, the only country in the world that has a military that could be strong enough to actually face off against China.
	They're encircling them, making deals with the Taliban, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Burma, Thailand.
	They know what they're doing.
	They're building bases in Sri Lanka.
	They're building bases in the Maldives.
	They're building bases in Djibouti.
	They're building bases in Africa.
	Naval bases on the Atlantic coast of Africa.
	They're working in Venezuela.
	They're doing everything they can to become the alternative to the United States in the world financial system.
	They don't want to be the junior partner anymore.
	Xi Jinping isn't going to settle for being the junior partner.
	Because the rival he's looking to purge now, it's not just some of the other communists in Shanghai.
	It's not just Bo Xilai of Chongqing.
	No, no, no.
	It's the United States.
	It's us.
	It's our politicians and our elites.
	If you're not on board, he'll get rid of you.
	If you stand in his way, He'll take you down.
	Now, if you've got family members that want to get rich, like, I don't know, a son of a vice president who wants to come over and take millions of dollars in investment, work on some special deals, he's more than happy.
	More than happy to compromise on his way up.
	Because he's building an empire.
	Hong Di, the Red Emperor.
	This is how he sees himself.
	Now he views what he's doing as the rise of China, the strengthening of China, the return of China, Zhong Guo, to its initial place among the world.
	Zhong Guo means central kingdom.
	The kingdom that's at the center of the globe.
	The kingdom that all others bow down to.
	If you know anything about Asian history and ancient China, that was true.
	They ruled Vietnam with an iron fist for over a thousand years.
	Every country in all of Asia paid tribute to the emperors of China.
	And this is what he wants again.
	But the problem for the United States is an old Athenian generals quote.
	And that was General Thucydides.
	It's now referred to as the Thucydides Trap.
	And this idea is that when there is a rival power and an emerging power, those trajectories eventually come to a point which leads to conflict and the outbreak of war.
	Harvard University's Belfer Center ran a study that showed among 16 historical instances I've been focused on China for 15 years of my life.
	I lived there for two years.
	I studied Mandarin.
	I joined the United States Navy and became a linguist in Mandarin to understand what was going on with the rise of China.
	When you look at the way things are escalating with Taiwan, Things are escalating with Korea, with Hong Kong, what you saw with the crackdown of the protesters across China just recently, just a few weeks ago.
	And even John Mearsheimer has come out and said, we are on a collision course with China that will erupt into a world conflict.
	Are we ready for that?
	Is the United States ready for that?
	And what will happen when we go toe-to-toe with the Red Emperor?
	Thank you for listening to The China Files.
	My name is Jack Posobiec.

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