We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Dashinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on ACXIT, FDR,
LST, make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course
to the premium version of our website as well. Today we are joined by
Steven Moser. He's the author of the new book The Devil and Communist China
From Maw Down to z and he's also the head of the Population Research Institute.
Stephen, thank you for joining us. It's good to be here with
you today. Before we dive in the book, could you tell us a
little bit about the Population Research Institute. You have a very interesting career background,
and maybe get into a bit about how you ended up where you are
right now. Well, I'm not sure it's a career path that many people
would want to follow. Because I was overjoyed to be selected to be the
first American social scientist in China back in nineteen seventy nine. I was first
boots on the ground as it were selected by the State Department and the National
Security Council. But I can read, write, and speak Chinese, and
I became friends with the local Chinese people and got me in all kinds of
trouble because they began telling me tales of woe. They began telling me about
executions outside of the village during the land reform. They began telling me horror
stories about the cultural revolution. And of course I was in the commune when
the one child policy began in nineteen eighty and I saw friends of mine,
men and women who were pregnant with their second child arrested for the crime of
being pregnant. It had become a crime in March of nineteen eighty to be
that was the second or third child or fourth child in Guangdong Province, the
southern province near Hong Kong. And these women were actually arrested, taken away
from the village, locked up in a commune dormitory, and subjected to morning
tonight what would call study sessions, but they were propaganda. They were brainwashing
sessions intended to compel these young women who were carrying wanted children, compelled them
to go in for an abortion. And in fact I was there with them
as they were in these meetings, and I heard senior Communist Party officials,
all male by the way, tell these young women that they had no choice,
that they were going to be taken in for a forced abortion, and
that they shouldn't simply think they should sit in this They could sit in the
common dormitory and wait until they went into labor and give birth, because their
babies would be killed at birth if they didn't agree to an abortion before then,
So it was forced abortion. It was late term abortion. I went
with these young women into the operating room as they were given cesarean section abortions
in the seventh, eighth, and ninth month of pregnancy, and it was
I mean, it was a shattering experience for me because I'd never really thought
about what happens during an abortion procedure, but there it was bigger than life,
the death of a tiny son of Adam or daughter of Eve, perfectly
capable of surviving outside the womb with modest medical care, and of course the
grievest wounding of the mother. Suicide rates skyrocketed in China after the one Child
policy began, as young women who had been forced into abortions and then sterilized
subsequently so they couldn't have any more children took their own lives in despair.
I began to write about all these things, and the Chinese Communist Party was
not very happy, accused me of spying, which is perfectly ridiculous. I
was simply there as a scholar. I was an anthropologist, I was a
sinologist, and I was there to do my doctoralists station research. Well,
it turned out that not only the Chinese Communist Party was unhappy, but so
was the National Security Council in the State Department and Stanford University. Stanford was
actually told by senior Communist officials that unless I were severely punished, that no
Stanford research who would ever be welcome in China again. And so after a
cursory review of my research, Stanford and I parted company. And it was
actually the best thing that ever happened to me, because if I had gotten
tenure, I would have been shackled. I would have been throttled. I
wouldn't have been able to speak the truth and freed from the demands of an
institution. I've been able to read, write, and speak, you know,
exercise my freedom of speech quite well. Over the last forty years.
I've written a dozen books. I started a research institute called Population Research Institute
to fight against coercive population control. Population control, of course, is always
coercive. It's inherent in the very name right population control, even if it's
sometimes disguised as family planning or reproductive health. And so that's what I do.
We've been able to have some successes over the years. We cut funding
to the UN Population Fund under the Reagan administration, and those funding cuts carried
over into Bush one Bush too, and of course into Trump. We cut
funding to the UN Population Fund because they were involved in supporting China's one child
policy, although they denied the forced abortion for sterilization aspect in the name of
controlling the growth of the world's population. And now, of course we all
realize that overpopulation was a myth, and that our long term problem is not
going to be too many people, too many babies. It's going to be
too few people, the aging and dying of populations. Now not just in
Western Europe, but North America, China, other countries are following suit,
and the world's population is going to begin to decline in a few decades.
And I don't see anything that's going to stop that decline from accelerating and that's
uncharted territory. This is the first time the world's population has declined since the
Black Death in the Middle Ages. So that's my history of involvement in China.
I've stayed involved in China. I used to go secretly across the border
in the middle of the night with a new passport. I don't do that
anymore. It's too dangerous. Well tell us about that. It sounds like
a lot of incredible stories from that alone. Well, you know, I
was not content simply to expose the abuses of women and children and families in
China in the one Child policy and in other communist policies. I wanted to
do what I could to help people in China, and so I've always encouraged
adoption. I like to say I have a lot of little god Daughters around
the United States, little girls who were adopted by couples here in this country
after hearing, after hearing about the plight of abandoned little girls in massive numbers
of abandoned little girls and orphanages in China, We've been able over the years
to start a couple orphanages in China to take care of the abandoned baby girls.
Those projects still continue today, and we've been able to do some other
good work in China, including setting up a few safe houses for women who
were fleeing forced abortion. Well, the one child policy is over, but
there are still young women in crisis pregnancies who've been abandoned by boyfriends or families,
and we still have those safe houses and we take them in and care
for them until they give birth. So we've been able to do what we
can. It's a very modest effort, of course, but it's better to
light a candle than to curse the darkness. Now, a big chunk of
this new book is focused on Mao himself, and there's so much history that
is just not told well or in depth in the United States. There's so
much to know about Mao, especially as it pertains to the topic of this
book, which again is titled The Devil and Communist China. So if you
had to dig into, you know, some of the stuff you wanted to
flesh out in the book, or if you had to give us an overview
of some of the stuff you wanted to flesh out in the book, I
think especially that stuff and a lot of it is not well known here in
the States. Where would you start. You know, what do you think
people in America need to know about the legacy and the history of Mao that
perhaps they just don't well. I think that people in the United States,
who are generally generous, understanding forgiving, and not eager to condemn other people,
other cultures, other even other political systems, need to understand that the
founding of the People's Republic of China by Mauzatoon and the structure of the Chinese
Communist Party is diametrically opposed to the founding of the United States. I mean,
you have the United States, which was founded on Judeo Christian principles by
a group of quite frankly brilliant men who were interested in establishing a government that
protected the rule of law and prevented overreached by the government. And the founding
documents of our country are the most brilliant, brilliant documents I think ever struck
off the mind of men in China. It's the opposite, I think,
because you look at the the history of Mao Jatoon and the communist party structure
that he put in place, modeled upon the Leninist structure of the Soviet Union,
and you see the polar opposite of that. You see a man who
at every turn chose an evil path. And you compare that to George Washington,
who, even as a young man, had a whole book of rules
that he followed. The man was a master of self control, and at
every turn he asked what was good, not for him, but what was
good for his fellow Americans and his country. At every turn, Mao asked
the opposite. And he was quite frank about this, because he admitted,
as a young man, he said, his view of things was that there
were other people and things in the world, but they only existed for him
and for his use, as if he who were some you know, Demi
God come down from Mount Olympus to move the rest of us around the chessboard
of the world in whatever fashion was to his own interest. And that's exactly
what he did at every turn. And it's also interesting that every time he
faced a moral choice, even in the case where he could accomplish some end
by doing the right thing by being honest and forthright and open about his goals,
or he could accomplish the same end by being deceitful and underhanded and deceptive,
he would choose deception and count himself clever in the process. I should
give you some examples of that. One is killing with a borrowed knife,
and I refer to the fifth commandment, thou shalt not kill. Now delighted
in killing, even as a leader of a gorilla band in the qing gang
Shan Mountains early on in his career in the early nineteen thirties, when they
were in the business of killing landlords and rich peasants and ransacking their homes and
stealing their goods, mal took pleasure in being personally involved in those killings.
Later on, of course, it became industrial sized killing and he could no
longer personally participate, but he oversaw the death probably one hundred million Chinese over
the course of his career. Killing with a barred knife, though, refers
to using another force or using a foreign enemy to kill off your opponents,
and that's what he did. He betrayed During the Civil War between the Communists
and the Nationalists. There were different factions in the Chinese Communist Party, most
of which were better armed and better equipped and more numerous than his. He
would betray those factions to the Nationalists, to Shang Kai Chek's nationalists and allowed
the nationalists to kill them to eliminate an enemy within the Communist party. Killing
with a barred knife. Jed aoshouer and it's called in Chinese. But he
also did that during the Korean War. It's sad to realize that most of
the Communist troops, the two hundred and fifty thousand Communist troops that were committed
to Korea during the Korean War were actually surrendered Nationalist troops which had come over
in the late stages of the Civil War in nineteen forty nine, nineteen forty
eight and nineteen forty nine, when whole Nationalist armies were surrendering en Moss,
they were given new commanders and then sent in nineteen fifty into Korea where they
were killed by us again killing with a barrow knife. So master of deceit
and deception, who delighted in the same So the kind of the evil opposite
of the kind of leader that we imagine we hope that our own country we
know, has had in the past, and we hope we'll have again in
the future. This is Molly Hemingway of the Federalist joined me, my husband,
Mark of real clear investigations twelve time All American Swimmer, Riley Gaines,
Aaron Wren of The American Conservative, and others for the twenty twenty four Making
the Case Conference Friday July twelfth and Saturday July thirteenth at Concordia University, Chicago.
Learn more at Issues Etc. Dot org. Making the Case July twelfth
and thirteenth in Chicago, Issues Etc. Dot Org. I'm really fascinated by
how Mao came into this long history of Chinese culture and sort of slotted Leninism
into all of that. Can you tell us about because now, of course
Shedent Pang, and I'm sure you have many things to say about this.
Talks about socialism with Chinese characteristics. That's what sort of that's that's the phrase,
that's the the category, the title for the system. But how did
now, just beginning with Leninism, how did he take that and adapt it
to his country? Basically, well, here's a history for you. Twenty
five hundred years ago, during what's called the Warring States period in China the
fifth century, fourth or third century BC, there were in the beginning of
the Warring States period, hundreds of little feudal lords ruling over small territories in
northern China, and it was a war of all against all that went on
literally for centuries. And the ruler who emerged triumphant from that centuries long war
was a ruler who followed a philosophy called legalism. And legalism is an early
kind of it's a kind of proto totalitarian, it's an early kind of Marxist
Leninism. Why because in legalism you find a standing army. You find the
government has control of important economic sectors like the production of iron for weapons,
and agriculture, like the production of salt, which is a vital element of
the human diet. You have concentration camps twenty five hundred years ago in China.
The concentration camp inmates built the Great Wall and the Great Canals of China.
You have propaganda troops going around the country singing the praises of the now
emperor of the Qin dynasty started in two twenty one BC. And you have
the killing of people who propagate competing philosophies, so that there were huge numbers
of scholars killed by the first emperor of the Qin dynasty. Chan dynasty from
which we get the word China. The Confucian scholars, the followers of Menshus,
the Daoist scholars, all of the other scholars, all of them were
killed. And the only works that were allowed to be promulgated were works by
the legalists and works on agriculture. You needed crops, right, so they
didn't burn the works on agriculture, but there was a great burning of the
books in China. Well, that empire, based on pure brutal totalitarian control
of the population collapsed after a few decades and was replaced by the Han dynasty.
Now, the Han dynasty emperors did something very clever. They resurrected Confucianism,
right, because the Confucian view of life and social order and political order
is this that the people are the children and the emperor is the father.
Figured all the children should obey the father, just as the younger brothers should
obey the older brother. The students should obey the teacher, the wife should
obey the husband, the young you know, and all of that. It
was a philosophy of social order. So the Han dynasty emperors took this Confucianism,
resurrected it as it were, and don the silken garb of Confucianism and
pretended to be the father of all the Chinese people. But inside that Confucian
garb, of that silk and garb of Confucianism was the iron scaffolding of legalism.
And they said openly that we're Confucian on the outside, but we're legalist
on the inside, which is the same as saying we're confusion on the outside.
We pretend to be nice to you, but we will kill you if
you object to our rule. We are totalitarian on the inside. That's the
political culture of China for twenty five hundred years. Then we come to the
twentieth century. We've got young Mao. And in the nineteen twenties, when
Mao was getting involved in politics, there was a huge movement in China to
become like the United States. But following the Soviet Union establishment, there was
a counter movement to follow the Soviet Union. Lenin and then Stalin began to
send agents to China to say, you don't want to follow the United States
and the West, you want to follow our pattern. And that pattern matches
almost perfectly the ancient structure of legalism. So what Malzadom did as a young
man, he saw in communism a philosophy that enabled him to see total control
of the country and institute the same totalitarian controls that the emperors had over the
centuries. At the same time, it commands a respectable audience in the West.
I mean, we have our own left that thinks Marxist Leninism is just
wonderful. And he was able to get financial support from Stalin from the beginning.
Stalin was sending him arms and a monthly subsidy to fund his rebellion.
Shang Kai Shehek, of course, who had by then become Christian, was
modeling his country on the United States. The nationalist Chinese today on the island
of Taiwan. Their constitution is modeled on our constitution, quite frankly, but
China went the other way. The Communist won the Civil War because of help
from the Soviet Union. But that's where malk comes in. What he did
was replace the Silk and Garbae Confucianism with the fantasy of communism that one day
the government is going to fade away, everyone will be perfectly equal, all
needs will be met, and no one will have a worry in the world.
But underneath that fantasy of communism was the iron scaffolding of totalitarianism, which
is almost perfectly with the ancient Chinese philosophy of government of legalism. So that's
where Mao was coming from, and that's how he established the structure that remains
in place today. And Mao was a very evil man, but the evil
is not limited to him personally. It is kind of inherent in the structure
of the Chinese Communist Party itself, which is organized like a war party.
It is it is, it is organized in a fashion so that it is
capable of waging war on its own people and waging war on the wider world.
And it is that structure, especially the politbureau, that breeds Chairman Mao's
like you know, McDonald's makes hamburgers. It's a creature like Chairman Mao.
A megalomania is a natural outcome of the kind of factional warfare that is built
into the communist power structure. So fascinating. You know, Paul Kanger wrote
a book called The Devil and Karl Marx not long ago, and he sort
of pulled out these examples even from Marx's poetry that some people might not be
super familiar with, where it's dabbling in Satanism. Is there anything Stephen similar
parallel with Mao? And you know, Satanism, devil admiration, anything like
that. Well, let me let me say that The Devil and Communist China.
My book has a forward written by Paul Kanker because he's the editor of
the series The Devil, and you know Karl Marx The Devil and Bellad The
Devil and Communist China. Serious, So Paul kicked this off with a very
very good book. Uh and yeah Marx. Uh. Marx seems in his
poems almost to have made a pact with the devil. We don't know that
for certain, but Mao was a very different character. Mao described himself as
lawless and godless, and those two sort of go together because if he reject
God's law, the natural law, which is written in the human heart,
you are fundamentally declaring that you're lawless, and you're rejecting God as well.
So he did, from a very young age reject I don't think he was
ever exposed to Christianity as a boy, but he was exposed to Buddhist beliefs,
the respect for all life, the necessity for self control, the necessity
to avoid evil. He rejected all that. As a young teenager he was
exposed to Confucian ideas, the ideas, of course we talked about of social
order, of obeying your parents, for example, he rejected that. Later
in life he said that his father, who who was the origin land rich
peasant, not a landlord at all, but someone who had a little extra
land, should have been struggled and perhaps killed because he was exploiting the people.
That was his own father. That he was able to that he wanted
to throw into the into the dustment of history. So what he uh did
though as a young boy, he was taken out at the age of three,
he was barely more than a toddler by his mother, out to a
stone monolith with a pool at the base of it that was thought by the
villagers to be inhabited by a spirit. Certainly his mother believed that, and
his mother made him kneel down and cowtow, that is, knocked his head
on the ground nine times in the traditional cowtow, and she recon she consecrated
him to the spirit of the monolith, and she in fact rebaptized him.
She gave him a new name. She called him the third son of the
Monolith. Or the third son of Stone Sirsanyadza in Chinese. He was very
proud of that name, oddly enough, and he often referred to himself and
the third person as the third son of the Monolith. And I wonder if
that wasn't an exposure to a demonic spirit of a con of course, he
was only a little boy, but the fact that he reflected on it later
in life and he called himself by that name, he would have consciously rejected
anything having to do with the supernatural. But if you look at his actions,
and I look at them through the lens of the ten command But so
I didn't want to write a traditional biography of malth that's been done before.
Most of them are fantasies, of course, not based on reality, a
touch on the real mouth. What I want to do is I look want
to look at mouth through the lens of the natural law written in every human
heart and every commandment from the first. He rejected God, the first Commandment,
He rejected his own parents. He rebelled against his father, especially the
fourth commandment, the fifth commandment. My goodness, we already talked about that.
He's the killingest man in human history. Bad grammar, but The point
is he was responsible for the deaths of one hundred million Chinese during the Civil
War and later on during the purges and persecutions and famines and Cultural Revolution and
so forth. He's also kind of the spiritual father of the one child policy
because he said in a nineteen fifty eight speech that we need to control reproduction
in the same way we control production. The party should set up, he
said, an Office of State Planning of reproduction. Well, that's exactly what
happened. Twenty two years later, when I was in China Commandment, National
Nut committed El three Boy. He was a serial polygamist. He married and
then abandoned a series of wives. But the worst thing he did in the
sexual arena was this. He was fond of reading Chinese history, and later
in life he almost entirely quoted Chinese history. He didn't quote Marks and Lenin
anymore. He quoted the ancient legalist scholars and emperors. And he read one
time that the Yellow Emperor, who is a mythical figure, by the way,
several thousand years ago in history, there's supposed to be a Yellow Emperor
from whom all living Chinese are descended. It's made up story. But the
Yellow Emperor supposedly achieved immortality by sleeping with a thousand virgins, and that gave
now an idea. In his sixties, he decided he was going to do
the same thing and achieve immortality the same way the Yellow Emperor had. And
so he had his secret police Aren't going into villages around China and find the
prettiest, most attractive twelve and thirteen and fourteen year old girls, innocent young
girls, and had them brought to him. Every night there'd be a new
girl or two or three, and this went on for years. And the
other thing that he did, aside from, you know, destroying the innocence
of these young village girls, he also had, as it turned out,
and untreated sexually transmitted disease, which because it didn't bother him, he didn't
want to have it treated. He was sort of afraid of different medications,
so he left that STD untreated and probably infected hundreds of girls over the years.
And the other thing that I should point out in that regard is he
had no feeling for these girls. Call he would use them and then send
them back to the village. And I compare that in the book to the
way the emperor behaved. Now the emperor had the Forbidden City, he had
the empress, and then he had concubines. And some of the empress had
two concubines, and some had two hundred and one, or two had two
thousand, many of whom he never even saw, didn't know their names,
didn't sleep with They were merely political matches. But the fact is that concubinage
was an officially gave you an officially recognized status. There was a ceremony,
you entered the forbidden City, you were taken care of for the rest of
your life. You had shelter, you had food, You were considered to
be a minor wife, a little wife of the emperor. Mao didn't emulate
that part of Chinese practice. He simply used these girls and then threw them
away. Remember he said, there are other people and things in the world,
but they're only there for my pleasure and my use. And he lived
that statement, lived that belief. So that's the sixth commandment, seventh commandment,
Thou shalt not steal. Basically, he stole the entire wealth of China.
There were he had resorts, he had places to stay in every province,
He was treated like the entire country was at his disposal, every material
resource, every person answered to him, thou shalt not fair false witness.
He was a master of deceit, as we've talked about, and just delighted
in deceiving people and getting his way. Coveting. Well, we've already covered
coveting, so just looked at from the standpoint of the natural law. He
was one of the most evil people who ever lived. And I don't think
he consciously, you know, made a pact with the devil, but I
do think that if he had that, I can't imagine that he would have
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com. Now can you sort of connect points A and B for us?
Just from your subtitle? From quite literally from Mao to sheden Ping, what
is the connective tissue? What legacy is Xi Jinping taking from Mao? Well,
Mao is is the founding emperor of the Red Dynasty, and Xi Jinping
has taken Mao as a model in all things. Ci jing Ping today has
for example, a thriving personality cult, and in China there is now a
ci gen Ping app that everyone has to download on their phones, which which
gives you a daily reading from She's speeches and writings. That is the daily.
Shei gen pink scripture reading. As it were, Mao had his little
red book and his collective works with a little red book people got, you
know, and carried around. It's become even easier today with c g Ping
because it's on your phone, and yeah, you should read it every day.
Basically, c ging Ping is following in the footsteps of Mao. In
fact, I would argue that she has amassed even more power than Maoa did
because she is not only the head of the Chinese Communist Party, he is
the de facto head of government. He's the so called president of the country,
although that position doesn't formally exist in the Chinese political system. He's also
the chairman of the Central Military Commission. He's also the chairman of several what
are called small groups within the Chinese governmental structure, and in China he's known
as the chairman of everything. Now you don't say that very loudly because he
gets you in trouble, but people whisper, yeah, the chairman of everything.
In fact, so that the premiere in China, who used to be
in charge of economic matters and and and run the actual governmental structure separate from
the party structure, is basically now doing what the Chinese call laying flat time
ping, which means he's just staying out of the way. He's not doing
very much because he doesn't want to get in the way of the of the
true ruler of China who holds all the reigns of power, that is shijen
Ping, you know. So it's it's it's a system that the current occupant
of the dragon throne in China is following, emulating Mao in all things,
including in his desire to drive China down the road towards full blown communism.
Uh. He has said in speech after speech that his goal is to achieve
socialism with Chinese characteristics, which means that we are now seeing China go once
more down the socialist road to ruin. The whole private sector of the economy
that grew up in the eighties and nineties and in the first years of this
century is now under threat by she because she is continuing to expand the state
sector and bringing what was once nominally the private sector under state control. There
are now political commissars sitting on the boards of directors of all the major companies
in China, the private companies, and if you're the chairman of the board
or the owner of the company, and sitting across from you is a political
commissar representing the all powerful Chinese Communist Party. You no longer own your company.
You take direction from the political commissar. And Sijping may have said he
doesn't mind people getting wealthy as long as they use their wealth to serve the
party, but the political commissars have taken that a step further. They think
the best way to ensure that the CEOs and the billionaires use their wealth to
support the party is to actually take the wealth from them. And so billionaires
and CEOs are being arrested literally by the thousands in China today on true or
false charges of corruption, we don't know, and their wealth is being stolen
by Communist Party officials again because because Shi Jingping has put a target on their
back by saying that he wants to move in the direction of state ownership of
all the means of production. That's what the Chinese Communist Party name means in
Chinese, the gong Chandan gong means public, Chan means property party Dong.
So the public proper party, the party of state ownership of everything, is
the gung Chan Daan the Communist Party, and that's the direction he's moving in.
So he, like Mao, is a committed communist. He, like
Mao, I think, will wind up destroying the Chinese economy because we know
that socialism always succeeds in creating tyranny and not creating the goods it's supposed to.
But in the process he will aggrandize his own power. And I'm afraid
that, like Mao, as he gets older seventy, he's going to become
even more paranoid and even more distrustful of people, even within the Chinese Communist
Party. And you saw that at the last Party Congress, because his one
faithful supporter from the very beginning when he took office in twenty twelve, was
the previous President Hu Gene Tao. Well, what happened at the last meeting
of the Party Congress on the final day of the Party Congress, who Gene
Tao was lifted out of seat by security guards and escort it from the room.
Why because he had opened the folder containing the names of the new Politbureau
members and he had been told that he was going to be Shei gen Ping
had agreed to let three members of the Houjen Tao faction serve on the polet
bureau, and Ujen Tao opened the folder. This guy is the former president
of China, the former leader of the Communist Party was for ten years.
Before she opens a folder, a look of astonishment comes across his face as
he realized that none of the members of his faction are even listed on the
pollit bureau. They're all Sijing Ping's people. At that point, he begins
to complain to c Gene Ping he's sitting next to, and that's when the
security guards come and take him out of the room in full view of the
hundreds of members and alternate members of the Chinese Communist Party, thus making it
clear to everybody that you do not go against Cijen Ping in animatter at all,
or you two can be removed from the room and put under house arrest,
you know. And that sort of brings me to the next question I
want to ask, which is how dark this could get? And you were
talking about that just now. I want to add, you know, this
question also about the Chinese middle class, which is much bigger now than it
was obviously when when Mao stepped in and has different standards of living. You
know, higher standards of living, but at the same time is a very
fragile is in a very fragile position, and not all of China is middle
class. Obviously, there's still a lot of abject poverty in China that they're
allegedly trying to entirely eleven eight zero percent. We'll see how that goes for
them. But how dark do you think this could get? Are we looking
at potentially a more mass death in the vein of what happened with Mao sort
of even in the era of high tech and social media. Where does this
go? Well, It's important to realize that China has never successfully created a
thriving domestic economy. Its economic growth has been disproportionally based on export growth.
And so the export sector of the economy has thrived over the last forty years
because of three things. Because we in the United States and the West funded
it. We sent trillions of dollars of investment into China. We in the
West, particularly in the United States, opened our markets to cheap Chinese made
goods, thus giving them a ready made export market. And we in the
West, particularly in the United States, either consciously transferred or allowed to be
stolen trillions of dollars in intellectual property over the last few decades. Now,
that's in other words, we enabled the rise of the country, the political
system, the Communist party that wants to destroy us, which I think is
probably the greatest strategic blunder in human history. But it may be that Chi
gene pain destroys because he can't help himself. The only sector of the Chinese
economy that actually operates at a profit, you see, because the state owned
enterprises don't. They're dinosaurs, they are white elephants. They require state subsidies.
And sure, China produces more times of steel every year than most of
the rest of the world combined, which is far more than China now needs.
So it overproduces products and then it dumps some overseas at prices that are
sometimes below low market prices. But those those products produced by state factories are
subsidized. So ultimately the Chinese people are losers in that particular game. If
the if the entrepreneurs, if they're well creators of the last thirty years,
are killed off. And I mean that literally, I mean there are the
most dangerous place to be a billionaire in the world today is China, because
literally you know, hundreds of people, billionaire CEOs, thousands have been arrested,
They've been tortured, they're in prisoned for life, where they've been executed.
In some cases they've been suicided, which means that they just happen to
jump off the balcony of a twenty five story building and fall to their debts.
So all of that is going on. So the wealth of the wealth
creators is gradually being stolen by Communist Party officials, who in turn, you
know, are not investing in the domestic economy because that's not where the money
is. They're desperate to get their money out of China. There's a huge
pool of money and people that are desperate to get out of China. So
the domestic investment is not there, the domestic economy is not there. And
if the United States would simply continue the policies that we had under President Trump
of putting in tariffs in place that counterbalance the subsidies that the Chinese Communist Party
is using to subsidize its exports, we could bring this system down. Unfortunately,
under the current administration, we're not doing that. We're placating China.
Janet Yellen, Secretary Treasury was recently in China trying to job own the Chinese
into stopping overproducing goods, into stopping dumping goods on the international market, into
starting to respect intellectual property rights, into doing all of the other things that
we've been talking to China about to no avail for the last thirty years.
And Chinese officials will listen polidely, they may even nod, but they will
do nothing because the only thing they understand are actual, real consequences. Increased
tariffs, for example, would get their attention. Anything short of that is
just an empty promise, and you know, or an agreement where that's not
worth the paper it's written on. In Given your background, I want to
ask before I let you go, how the history of the one child policy
still dogs China still dogs the Chinese economy, the people, the culture.
What's your perspective, I mean, again, given your incredible history on this
particular topic, with how the country is still affected by this today. Well,
it turns out that that killing off four hundred million of the most productive,
enterprising, and hardworking people on the planet over the last two generations is
not a very smart idea, And I would argue it's an example of the
typical kind of overreach you see whenever a government or political party engages in a
kind of massive overreach. That's an understatement, but overreach that the Chinese Communist
Party invariably does. And I think the one child policy has meant many things,
but it is a at one level, it is a perfect reflection of
the hate that I believe that that Mao and the Communist Party itself, the
hate and the stain that he and the party has for their fellow human beings,
even those who happen to be Chinese. Mao exalted in the destructive power
of this hate. He said, once, communism is not love, it's
communism is a hammer that we used to crush the enemy. It turns out
most of those enemies who are crushed for Chinese, and some of them,
four hundred million of them, turned out to be unborn baby who now would
be twenty and thirty and forty years old. They would be educated, they
would be entering the workforce, they would be starting businesses, they'd be buying
homes and cars, they would be driving the economy forward. Instead, for
the last few years, China's population has been shrinking. China's population has been
aging for decades, of course, but now it is literally dying. They
are filling more coffins than cradles each year in China, and I talked about
the difficulty of that the domestic economy is having right now, there's sixty five
million empty apartments in China. They're so overbuilt, they're not enough people to
ever fill those apartments. The people who would have filled those apartments by marrying
and having children were killed, and so in a very real sense, the
Chinese Communist Party has killed off its future literally. And I don't see any
combination of bribe incentives that could induce young women in China to marry in their
early twenties and have three children, because that's what it would take to offset
the population decline. It would take all young women in China to marry and
have three children to offset the population decline. Why well, because there are
so few young women in China. Remember under the one child policy, the
preference for sons meant that millions of baby girls were selectively aborted or abandoned to
die after birth for decades, and so now we have so few women in
the child bearing years that everyone would have to marry and have three children.
I don't see any way the government can persuade young women to do that.
But I do think that the Communist Party would not hesitate as things get worse
in China demographically, as the population aging increases, not hesitate to force young
women to become pregnant. And so I hope that no one gives she gen
Ping a copy of the handmade sale, because he will bring it to life.
He will bring it to life. He will. He will order young
women to get married, he will order them to conceive children. He will
order them men for helving examinations to make sure they're pregnant, and he will
punish anyone who dares aboard a child that he has ordered conceived. There will
be I'm afraid before the end forced pregnancy. Why it's it's the mere image
of forced abortion, isn't it. Why would a government that forced women to
get aborted at nine months of pregnancy hesitate to force young women to get pregnant
and carry a pregnancy for nine months. They would have no moral compunctions whatsoever
about doing that. That is it is chilling. Steve Moser, the author
of The Devil and Communist China from Maw down to Sheet Thank you so much
for joining us and for all your INSIGHTSKS. Thank you you've been listening to
another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm I'm Elisashinsky, culture editor here
at The Federalist. Will be back soon with more. Until then, be
the lovers of freedom. I'm anxious for the fray. I heard the fame,
voice the reason, and then it faded away.