Communism With Chinese Characteristics | CLIP | American Thought Leaders

Talking about communist China, even today, even as we know there's at least one if not three genocides actively happening there, happening, being perpetrated by the communist regime there. Even today, some people say it's not communist anymore over there. Or they'll say something like, look, they lifted millions out of poverty. How do you respond to this? I've heard many people say that China is somehow more of a capitalist country now because it's allowed some market practices. But the market practices are still controlled by the state. So it's not capitalism the way we're used to it in the West especially. When I say the West, I include Japan and others that are geographically in the East, but they are part of the West. The party, it's a single party state. It's a single party communist state. It hasn't stopped defining itself as communist, so that's something else. It's violating human rights up, down, and around all over the place to serve the state. So it's still communist that way. I think a lot of people will say it was better at one point. This is something you often hear about China, right? It was better for a while. Well, it was better relative to being horrible under Mao, but it was still operating as a communist state even then. And then the reformers were not willing to get rid of everything. If they were going to allow some market mechanisms, they weren't going to do full market and they were never going to change politically. Because China, one of their main takeaways from the collapse of the Soviet Union and what happened before then in Eastern and Central Europe was, oh, we're not going to do it that way. We're going to keep political repression and control even if we experiment with some things on the market side. I think also the fact that the PLA owns so much of a lot of what's going on. When you have the military that involved with something, it's not free. And they're serving the state too. So you add it all up, then you get a very concerning thing that shows that it's still a communist country. Is it always the same every day like it was, for example, in the Mao period? No. But Xi Jinping is clearly, we're in another period where it's worse again. And even the better stages, if I think about it, did I want to live under Brezhnev? No. Did I want to live under Stalin? No. Would I take Brezhnev over Stalin if those are my options? Sure. This is the kind of thing that you're going through, but it's all communist states. And that's the case for China. And I do think at least in the last couple of years, more people are waking up about some of the atrocities that are going on. And thankfully, it's finally happening that people know. And now we got to work on exerting pressure so things will stop and the situation will improve for everybody. We live in an era of censorship and disinformation, and it can be really hard to know what's true and what's false in this information climate. To get honest information and insights you can trust, join us on Epoch TV. You can sign up for your 14-day free trial at ept.ms.freetrial.com. That's ept.ms.freetrial.com. You described this as a living museum. I go back to this in different interviews. It's difficult for people who haven't tasted lack of freedom at a societal level to grasp what that might be like. And similarly, as the reverse may also be true to some extent. Let's go and look at it very simply. What if somebody realized that each day they're not allowed to talk about what they want to talk about? First of all, somebody would be trying to tell you don't think the way you want to think, or don't believe the way you want to believe, or worship the way you want to worship, or whatever. So all this still be doing freely. But then if that person tells you, okay, now you can't even really wear what you want to wear. You can't go to school the way you want to go to school necessarily. You can't work at what you want to work at. You can't interact with certain people because of whatever class they are. You might be asked to talk about what your friends and family are doing, rather than keeping that private. And if we keep showing people these are the conditions of living under communism, and that even the countries that are trying to offer more opportunities, I suppose, you know, if you think about something like Vietnam where they're experimenting with certain things more with the market. If somebody wants to really exercise their free speech, then they're put in jail still there. If they are opposed to the party, if they're opposed to the state, it's not free for every person in Vietnam. You know, if you still take on the state, if you still take on the party, then you're going to be imprisoned. Your life is not going to be yours to live. You're going to resist, which that's a good thing. But I think going back to just telling people, especially young people, because so much of our focus here at Victims of Communism and the museum is helping the future generations, rising generations, understand communism now as well as the history. And if they just understood, okay, look, you just wanted to do that, or you wanted to do a TikTok. Okay, well, it's being monitored by so-and-so, and you can't do this one. Or you want to get together with your friends and do this. No, you can't do that now. And it's not because your parents are concerned for your safety. It's because the Communist Party of the state is telling you, you can't. Then maybe that would reach people, that they see that this really is something that's an opposition to what we take for granted, for what we live under in the United States and other liberal democratic nations. We're going to be entering Gallery 3, and this covers from the end of World War II to the present. And one of the features in here is an interactive. Would you like to try this? I would love to try this. This is fantastic. Let's check it out. It's a show of conditions under communism. Not everybody's killed by communism, but they still have to live under communism. You get to choose if you want to be somebody from Cuba or from North Korea or from East Germany. You can go the easy way, the hard way, you'll see that you get choices. So I'm the daughter of a resistance leader. That's right. And your father has just disappeared after a protest. Okay, begin your journey. He's been killed. So will you fight the state media's lies in response? So the state media is basically saying that he died in a car accident and they had nothing to do with it, even though you've heard other reports that state security were trailing along in the car and pushed it off the road. Okay, I'm fighting. So now you have your choices, as you can see here. And one is, don't respond. Take the opportunity, just be quiet, comply. And here you have a couple of choices, if you want to fight. Okay, hunger strike. Tell the story to a BBC reporter, to an international reporter. Don't respond to the regime's lies. So I'm going to pick this one because I think that actually most people would probably do this because the consequences of standing up are too much. So you get your father's body back. But you have to issue a statement saying that the government had nothing to do with his murder. Your brother and you are still the children of this great dissident. And an entire movement that he began. So these are the consequences of choices, right? Cuban citizens stage a march. They are arrested and imprisoned under inhumane conditions. Fascinating. This is a really developed story you've got going here. Yes. Well, part of this, we were talking about how some people don't understand that it affects every little choice, right? Everything, every day, somebody living under the conditions of communism, what do they have to do? They get up in the morning and maybe still inside their head, they're thinking their free thoughts, but then everything they're doing to the outside world, they have to make a choice. Sometimes the choices you have to make are impossible choices. That's right. That's right. This is not the, am I getting a cup of coffee today? Am I spending the $3 or $5 to get the dressed up drink? Whatever. These are not the kinds of choices that you're having to make. These are life and death and perhaps going into prison kind of choices. For all of these stories, they're actually based on real people who made their own choices. And we want visitors, especially young people who will be attracted to playing a game to understand that they made different choices sometimes than the actual person did, but these choices are based on real people. I've heard this over and over again from survivors where they say they can't do anything worse to me, you know, after they've lost a family member and then they keep fighting.