Name: Here’s How Trump Can Leverage the CCP’s Greatest Vulnerability | Ambassador Sam Brownback
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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] What if the most potent weapon that America has against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) isn’t nukes or tariffs?

“This isn’t a competition between the largest economy and the second largest economy. This is a competition of ideals—and we’ve got the better ones,” says former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback.

“If you want to hit them where it hurts, hit them on human rights issues, genocides in their own country, religious freedom that they don’t grant any of their people—whether they be Buddhist, Muslim, Falun Gong, Christians. That’s where they’re the weakest. It’s where they’re the most vulnerable.”

Ahead of President Donald Trump’s expected meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, I sat down with Brownback to understand what he sees as the Chinese regime’s greatest vulnerabilities, its deepest fears, and how those can be strategically leveraged by the United States.

Brownback is co-chair of the International Religious Freedom Summit. He previously served as governor of Kansas from 2011 to 2018 and as a U.S. senator from Kansas, 1996 to 2011. His upcoming book is titled, “China’s War on Faith.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Ambassador Sam Brownback, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Thanks, Jan. Good to join you.

Recently, the Chinese Communist Party arrested a whole number of leaders of the Zion Church in China, part of their overall constant crackdown on faith. But why this group? Why now?

I think they’re hostages. I think that’d be the better way to look at it instead of just saying, well, this is some random sort of church raid that they did or do all the time. I think they’re hostages. I think it was purposeful. I think it was right ahead of the Xi Jinping meeting with Trump that he did it. It’s sort of like the rare earth issue where he says, I’m going to cut off rare earth minerals being exported to the United States to try to create this sort of maximum pressure environment. You’ve got a lot of Christians in Washington and the United States that are interested.

I think it is one of the most ham-handed things the Chinese could have done. I think it’s one of the most ridiculous things, kind of like wolf diplomacy, if you will. This is an oxymoron. You aren’t going to be achieving diplomatic gains by being a wolf. I think it’s a terrible move, but I think it’s strategic and one that they’ve done to create pressure on President Trump.

The president has mentioned that he may bring up the incarceration of Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong as part of these discussions. So that’s interesting because he’s indicated an interest in something other than trade when it comes to this whole picture. How do you read that?

It is promising, because previously, and often, President Trump has wanted to really kind of try to isolate things. Let’s just talk about economic issues or let’s just talk about security issues. So if he’s saying we want to talk about economics plus some human rights issues, to me, that’s encouraging. You know, he wants to get a trade deal with Xi Jinping. He wants to do that to be able to help the economy. He wants to be able to help soybean farmers in red states be able to export into China. These are normal pressure points that you expect, and I think you’ll see.

But if he wanders into the human rights space, that’s, I think, actually where the payload is in our confrontation with China. You’ve got to talk about this horrific record they have on human rights, and you’ve got to talk about it to the world. It isn’t like, okay, if we trade China for the U.S. on economic and global leadership, it’ll all be the same. These are two diametrically different systems. I think we’ve really got to talk about these systems and not just about economic and trade issues.

So we’re filming this shortly before President Trump’s meeting with Xi Jinping. What advice would you give to the president, giving everything that you know about how the Chinese regime operates?

If you want to hit them where it hurts, hit them on human rights issues, genocides in their own country, religious freedom that they don’t grant any of their people, whether they be Buddhist, Muslim, Falun Gong, or Christians. That’s where they’re the weakest. It’s where they’re the most vulnerable globally. If you’re not interested in that, just cut a trade deal and call it good for now. Although you’ve got to know in your own heart, this isn’t going to be good for very long.

Xi Jinping has designs on the world. We may not think we’re in a Cold War with Xi Jinping in China right now, but they believe they are. And they’ve built a military up to have this. They have built up allies of dictators. They’ve got an operational axis of evil with Russia, Iran, North Korea, and a number of other satellite countries. This thing is already operational against us, whether we believe we’re in the fight or not. And I think we ought to really start hitting them where they’re the most vulnerable.

Ronald Reagan went at the Soviet Union before he was president, and he went at them on their values and their rights. He went at them and he said, look at what happens to the Jewish refuseniks. Look what happens to the evangelicals and by the godless communists that he would use. He’d use very pejorative terms. But what he was doing, he was speaking with clarity to the United States community and the broader freedom-loving community about who we’re up against. And I do believe the president needs to start speaking in those types of terms about who we are up against.

The president is known to talk about cards, you know, what cards you have. And you mentioned some of the leverage that the CCP has been using, for example, this rare earth, you know, unprecedented attempt at use of rare earths, but also this kind of hostage diplomacy, adding a bit of leverage with arresting these Christian leaders. How do you think human rights become leverage for the president?

I think it becomes leverage as we start talking about it. If Secretary of State Rubio flew to Dharamsala and met with the Dalai Lama and endorsed his third-way approach of a separate independent Tibet inside of China, that freaks Chinese leadership out. If the president were to meet with Falun Gong leaders in the White House, that creates huge pressure internally inside of China. These are the sort of things that don’t really cost any money. But the visual imagery of it, if the president were to meet in the Oval Office with a series of people that have been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party and just has them tell their story, that creates leverage because it shows what system we are up against.

And that’s what we really need to do, in my estimation, more than anything right now. This just isn’t an economic competition. This isn’t a competition between the largest economy and the second largest economy. This is a competition of ideals. And we’ve got the better ones. Ours are proven and they work in various places around the world. And communism hasn’t worked anywhere.

And one other quick point, the Chinese communists are very big about pointing out that these religions are imports to China. Christianity, Islam, something else. You know, the real import to China is communism. Communism was developed in Europe in the mid-1800s, and it’s being imposed on the Chinese people. The carpetbagger is communism, more than anything.

You described three genocides happening in China. I agree with this view, but I just want to explore that a little further. And also just to be clear, this term genocide is used so liberally these days by people for, you know, some kind of, you know, a significant number of people dying, sometimes people will call that a genocide. Genocide is something quite specific and extreme. And maybe if you can just explain that to me and why you think there’s three and what they are.

Yes, genocide is very specific. It involves a lot of carnage and death and attack of people, but it’s an identified group of people that this group of people in power seeks to eliminate. So there’s an intentionality that goes along with the genocide too. We want to wipe out this group of people. You’ve got the one declared of the Muslim Uyghurs in Western China that the United States has declared multiple administrations now and multiple countries have.

You’ve got one against the Tibetan Buddhists that has been going on longer even than the Uyghur genocide has been going on. And it’s both at its culture and it’s at its control level, and it’s killed a number of people as well. And there’s a third one of Falun Gong. And they’ve arguably had it the worst of anybody, where you’ve had this overt, aggressive attack that includes things like forced organ harvesting that you’ve talked about a great deal that is just mind-blowing in its graphic, horrific nature. But it doesn’t even stop there. It’s just an attempt to literally wipe out this group. And it’s intentional, and it’s focused, and they spend a lot of money to do it.

Imagine this. You’ve got three genocides going on right now, and here this is a country that holds itself up for respect in the world. And you’re doing three genocides, and you’re the second largest economy in the world, and we’re dealing with you? And you’re doing these things now in front of our very eyes, and we know about it? The Western world, and particularly the free world, really has to stand up more against this.

You raise such an important point here, actually, because if we’re making deals, we have to understand that we’re either working with the same value system or we’re working with a different value system. And you’re pointing out, obviously, a very different value system, so that hopefully would inform our decision-making around deal-making. I think for many years, this was not something that we really understood, frankly, in the West broadly, not just in the United States.

China thinks of the West and of really everybody as part of the green party. And by green, I mean money. Just that money buys it all. It buys the loyalty of your own citizens if we get the economy growing and you just leave us in power. They’re just part of the green party and the West is too. Well, and the Soviets in their era, they said, you know, you give the West enough rope, they’ll hang themselves. You know, it’s just part of the green party. They just want money. But at the end of the day, that actually, that’s just not true.

Arguably, this is something that Lee Smith argues in his recent book, The China Matrix. One of the big reasons why so many American elites kind of got in bed with the CCP was because they became part of the green party, I mean, to use your terminology now.

But actually, that’s the point. When Davos brings in one of the top Chinese leaders a couple of years ago to speak at Davos, you’re going, well, wait a minute. Look at what this country is doing. And why are you hosting this individual here in front of these mega big global company leaders?

Well, it’s all the green party then in that situation, but that’s not where the American people are. The American people are interested in making a good living. They’re interested in making money. There’s also a moral core here that they’re going, no, we’re just not going to do certain things or be a part of certain things. And they’re not going to be a part of the green party. And they don’t want their country to be a part of the green party.

And I think that’s where the Chinese Communist Party’s view of the world as it’s just all green party breaks down. Because there is a moral core here. And that’s what Reagan saw and understood with the Soviet Union. You appeal to that moral core of the people of the United States. And that’s what I really hope President Trump will do.

Well, so you mentioned this organ harvesting industry. Of course, it’s on my mind. I’m writing, as we speak, you know, a book that’s due very urgently. So this is something I think about all the time. I’m thinking about this hot mic moment, right? We have Vladimir Putin talking about achieving immortality through continual organ transplantations, if I slightly paraphrase, and then Xi Jinping saying, talking about a 150-year lifespan. How did you react to that?

I was aghast. I know about the organ harvesting things, and I thought, the only way you get the organs that you want is to kill somebody. And that person is probably a religious person or somebody that believes in human rights or is opposed to the regime. So you’re going to kill somebody so you can live to be 120 or 150. And you’re intentional about it, and you’re willful to do it. I mean, what leader thinks of their own people that way, other than a diabolical one?

So this whole organ harvesting industry grew exponentially in the early 2000s and kind of hit some kind of plateau around 2005. Hospitals are being built en masse. There’s no organ donation system or registry or anything like that. They’re telling everyone these are death row prisoners that are being used. The thing that struck me, right, is it turns into something like, I’ve been told, a $9 billion a year industry. I think this was David Matas’s estimate, based on, you know, kind of years of research and understanding all these numbers.

But the thing that struck me after this hot mic moment was that if you’re one of the Chinese elite, if you’re one of those 7 million red card holders that have access to even the highest, most elite health care that exists over there, you have unlimited on-demand organs available to you forever. And that’s worth more than even a few billion dollars, isn’t it? If you’re an amoral person.

If you’re an amoral person, this is worth all the money you’ve got, because once you lose the life here, that’s it for you. There’s an old saying that the dictator may take the life of the martyr, but once the martyr’s life ends, it actually begins for him. Once the dictator’s life ends, it ends for him. And you’ve got dictators and people in positions that are willing to harvest somebody else’s organs so that they can live longer. I mean, the words hurt to say. And that’s going on by one of your major global leading countries. How can you see a system like that leading the world and then leading all these other dictatorial authoritarian countries? This is the way to look at it. If you’ve got the power, you take the organ. It’s yours. That is a horrific world to consider. That is a world driven by evil.

How much of the Chinese population do you think knows, I mean, based on what you know, that this is actually happening?

I don’t think a very big percentage do at all. I think that it’s very controlled. Obviously, the Great China Firewall controls a lot of the information that can go in. I don’t think the general population knows. And my sense of it is the general population is so demoralized about the ability to change the system that, you know, the saying that it’s like they deal with the government like they deal with the weather. You just try to observe, do I need to put a coat on now before I go outside or not? I can’t change the weather, but I can put a coat on or I can take an umbrella. And I would hope that we would start to instill, at least particularly in the religious people, no, there is hope and we will stand up for you.

And that’s why I talk really about the religious people so much in all of them, because here is a group that’s still there. It’s the biggest civil society organization that exists within China yet today. It’s a group that answers to a higher authority than the Communist Party. It’s a group that’s willing to put their lives on the line to stand up for their freedoms. And we should be standing for them. We should be standing up and giving them hope, giving them hope that somebody outside hears this. And this is just not one of those situations where it’s the weather, you can’t change it. No, this can change and we’re going to stand with you to change it.

I think you’re raising such an incredibly important point and I just want to kind of build on this a little bit. A lot of people don’t understand that communism is totalitarian and in this totalitarian structure, it hates and tries to destroy all semblance of civil society because civil society by definition is not under its boot, right? And so what you’re describing, and it does this very jealously and has been doing it from the beginning, and that’s what makes it impossible to change except for religious believers, right?

Right. Religious believers are the only community left that we can work with inside of China that would stand up to this regime. And that’s why the regime spends billions of dollars to oppress and suppress and control every single religion within the country. And why I think we’ve been in malpractice in the West by not standing up more for these religious communities that are in our fundamental belief system. We believe in their right to religious freedom, and we believe it applies to everybody. And we haven’t been standing with them sufficiently.

And the other thing, we saw this in some of the Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union. Once Ronald Reagan started talking about the Jewish refuseniks, it gave them hope. They started fighting back more. They started resisting more because they had hope now that somebody was actually listening who had some potential and could do something about it. And that’s what we need to do for them now.

You know, something also strikes me here. You mentioned how you think, and I actually agree with you, that most Chinese really have no idea of some of the depths of depravity that the CCP has gone to. You know, we use, at The Epoch Times, we use a firewall, a variety of firewall-busting software that are actually incredibly effective at breaking through that firewall. And I keep thinking about that, you know, if more Chinese had, and it’s not, it’s a drop in the bucket, in a sense, compared to the 1.3 billion odd Chinese that are there.

But it is some millions that are regularly accessing through these systems. But if that could be increased, right, if people could actually understand what this regime is doing, and the benefits it’s offering to its super elites, and what the human cost of that is to the Chinese people themselves and their moral stature, and all of it, right? It’s something really powerful.

It’s powerful and it’ll change people. The Soviet Union during its era, and I keep going back to it, but the fight is substantially similar. They had these stores in the Soviet Union where you could only buy things with foreign currency because they were short of foreign currency. They had sheets on the front of the store, so you had to walk in; you had to be a foreigner or have foreign currency to get in the stores.

And I remember being there as a young man, and we were on, there was an exchange program. And I’m going, how do these things exist? Why aren’t the people just mad as hops that they can’t go in a store that I can go in? Well, it did make them mad. They didn’t like it.

And it’s the same sort of thing here. Once we tell people about, okay, there’s a whole health care system that you don’t have access to, and you’re never going to get access to it unless somehow you become an elite within the Communist Party. And that system has organs that they harvest from people illegally and clearly without their will and not with their donation. I think you really do start to build this anger up about the system, and you start to showcase its own evil nature. And I think this is just a regime that I hope is towards the end of its life expectancy of spreading and having this sort of evil over its own people and over the world.

You know, I posted last night from the China Forum, the very powerful testimony of Grace Jin Drexel, the daughter of the key pastor of the Zion Church. And immediately, all sorts of, let’s say, very pro-Chinese Communist Party accounts jumped in and started attacking and all sorts of stuff in the comments. And I was just thinking to myself, man, like this X is banned in China, right? But these people just have complete free access and can just be kind of really, really nasty. And it’s like, yeah, that’s part of the cost of being in a free country and allowing for free speech and so forth. But there’s absolutely no reciprocity here, right?

No. And we need to make it reciprocal. We need to make it costly on their side. I was governor of Kansas. We had a fusion center where we could get access to intelligence information. And the number of probings we had by China, Russia, and Iran-based probers and groups into the state of Kansas was huge and daily, regularly trying to get into systems, nuclear power plants, railroad operations, just all over the place. We’re fighting it off all day long.

Well, we ought to be going at them, particularly on the information systems, because information is such a warfare tool anymore. We’ve got to maximize the use of that, and as I say, breaking down that firewall is one of the key ways to do it.

And just free information, you know, free information.

Yes, that’s what we’re asking to do: just allow the regular Chinese person to get free information, where now they don’t have that. They don’t have access, so they only react to the information that they have, and what they get is spoon-fed to them by the Chinese Communist Party.

You say that the Chinese Communist Party is preparing the Chinese people for war. Can you explain exactly what you mean by that?

There’s studies on this about how governments prepare people for war, how governments prepare people for war, how governments prepare people for peace. And usually for war, it’s to identify the people that you’re opposed to and then to really start painting them as dark figures, as bad actors, as people that are after them. You’re seeing that in the language that China is using with its own people towards the United States.

And then you just see it in the sheer military buildup that they’ve got going on now. They’ve got a navy bigger and newer than ours. Why do they need a big Blue-water navy? What’s their objective here with this? Why have they tanked their economic relationships with the West, and particularly with the United States, and built up a military at the same time? What is that, not obvious on its face?

And then Xi Jinping, two months ago, had this Davos of dictators, as a friend of mine has referred to it, getting together. And if that doesn’t send you just this clear message of here is a group that’s lined up with evil intentions against us and against the Western democratic, open human rights system, I don’t know what more proof you need that this is a preparation and a preparation of people on a whole side for war.

You know, I’ll mention a couple of things that are, I guess, more on the hopeful side. So having watched this whole reality of organ harvesting evolve in terms of how much awareness there is and how much willingness, as you point out, it’s very hard to even find sometimes willing people to learn about this issue because it’s so macabre, because it’s so horrible when you realize what it really means that innocent people are being murdered for these organs.

Well, in the last few years, there’s been a massive sea change in terms of understanding. At least from my view, watching over 20 years, there are these two pieces of legislation, two in the Senate that have now passed the House to target this issue in a very meaningful way. There’s one in committee even. So there’s even a third piece of legislation. There are multiple states. Just as we were sitting down, I saw that Wisconsin is bringing up an organ harvesting bill, which I think they’re quite likely to pass. That’s kind of a positive change, at least in our ability here to address this and just kind of at least accept that it’s real and maybe challenge it somewhat. That’s one side.

The other side is, and this is a story I don’t get to tell often enough, is this Quit the Communist Party or Tuidang movement in China, where over the last 20 years, the Falun Gong have been going around talking to individual people, encouraging them to quit the Chinese Communist Party and its related organizations. And they’ve managed to get over 450 million people to do so. There’s this kind of power in that. And I wish we could tell this story more. There’s only so much you can try, right? But there are really some very positive things happening in China as well.

Very positive things. I remember having a conversation with David Eisenhower several years back about what was taking place in China. And David Eisenhower is a grandson of Dwight Eisenhower, son-in-law of Richard Nixon, well educated and very knowledgeable about global issues. And I said, what’s going on in China? Because this is when Xi Jinping was really starting to grab power.

And he said, well, I don’t know, I’m not a China expert. But he said, they’re not acting like a confident leader. They’re acting like an authoritarian, a bully, somebody that’s not confident in their system. They’re not confident in the long-term trajectory of where they’re going.

And I thought, that’s what it seems like to me. They’re acting much more like we’ve got to do this by strength instead of by persuasion. We’ve got to do this not by example, but we’ve got to do it just by ruthlessness. That’s not confident leadership. That’s leadership that is scared. I think there are a lot of signs here of real aging of this party’s ability to lead.

So one of the big topics at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s China Forum was this idea of transnational repression, which is the Chinese Communist Party extending that persecution of people that it does back home actually to America and other countries in the West. You recently visited the Shen Yun headquarters and where the Shen Yun dancers are trained and the college there and so forth. And so this is a group that I’ve been following very closely. We’ve been sponsors of Shen Yun for a long time and who are subjected to this type of transnational repression in a very surprising way. Can you spell out to me why the CCP would be so obsessed with Shen Yun?

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