The Free World must defeat a Leninist China

OPINION:

When Taiwan’s Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim sat down recently with the Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” podcast, she boldly declared: “We will not let the Communist Party of China (CCP) define who we are.”

That tone of self-confidence, strength and defiance are just what the times require. The CCP is aggressively attempting to conquer Taiwan through cognitive and grey-zone warfare, as much as through conventional means.

The contest over Taiwan is usually framed in terms of military might and readiness, diplomatic skill and superiority, and in terms of American will. All three framings, while necessary, miss the main point. The contest with the People’s Republic of China is ideological at its root and is winnable only if the free world understands the nature of a Leninist regime and acts accordingly.

The CCP’s weaponization of partial truths

The CCP is adept at the fusion of truths with distortions, a key element of Leninist statecraft. This is on full display in the crafting of an historical narrative to justify sovereignty over Taiwan.

To be fair, there are legitimate claims any generics Chinese state could make to justify union with Taiwan, and they require a serious answer. Han Chinese culture, Confucian statecraft, the written language, the kinship networks and the regional dialects of Taiwan were carried there from the mainland over centuries. There was no sovereign Taiwanese state before 1949. The Republic of China regards Taiwan as part of a polity that once governed the whole of China, not a nation that seceded from one.

Yet the CCP has used its Leninist knack for propaganda, deception, global influence peddling and institutional subversion to marry these legitimate arguments to nefarious purposes. This is embodied by the 1971 UN Resolution 2758 and the refusal of so many governments to formally recognize Taiwan as a state, in order to placate Beijing.

Facing hard geographic and demographic realities

Taiwan is roughly the size of Maryland. China is roughly the size of the continental United States with a population 60 times Taiwan’s. The strait is 130 kilometers wide and dominated by the densest shore-based missile force on earth. The CCP’s Rocket Force holds Taiwan’s airfields, ports, command centers and undersea cables at risk from launch sites already in place. A blockade would not require a shot; it would strangle the island by cutting its energy and food imports.

The United States, for its part, would have to project decisive force across 12,000 kilometers of ocean against a continental power sitting on the near shore. The nearest major American bases in Japan, Guam and the Philippines are all within Chinese missile range. There is no NATO-style adjacent land mass, no continuous logistics chain and no capacity to be on station at scale in the opening 72 hours of a conflict. Taiwan alone cannot defend itself indefinitely. American reinforcement is the binding constraint, and geography makes it the most challenging contingency for American power projection since 1945.

Leninism brooks no rivals

The material arithmetic is plain. The CCP’s historical claim cannot be realized except by force or blockade, and geography favors the claimant.

Fortunately, there is a path forward for the United States and its allies to overcome these challenging circumstances. The decisive variable is not the power of China; it is the Leninist DNA of the regime that governs it.

The CCP is no longer Marxist in the doctrinal sense. It is Leninist where it matters: in the organization of the party as the unshared instrument of state power, in the perpetual identification of enemies, and in the doctrine of unrestricted warfare that operationalizes all of civil society, the media and international law as terrain to be shaped. The “Three Warfares” of psychological, media and legal warfare, and the “360-degree” doctrine of perpetual engagement are not the conduct of a state. They are the conduct of a totalitarian monopoly party that has internalized the philosophy that all relations are relations of force.

A Leninist party cannot tolerate a successful democratic rival on its claimed national territory, because that rival’s existence is a standing refutation of the party’s claim to the future. This is why peaceful coexistence is impossible under the current ideological frame and why the diplomacy of “managing competition” has produced serial and dangerous disappointments. The frame itself must change.

A future for liberty

It is ideology that gives the CCP regime its dark, persistent purpose. Military and economic containment are necessary, but they are insufficient on their own. The free world must move beyond a defensive, materialist posture and commit to exposing the Party’s anti-human framework. By investing in a compelling, humanly resonant ideological counterpoint, we can hasten the internal fractures that history eventually imposes on all such regimes.

When that day of change arrives, a free Taiwan will remain, standing as a testament to the endurance of liberty.

• Frank Kaufmann, Ph.D., is a writer and analyst focused on ideology, democracy, and great-power competition. He is director of The International Freedom Alliance at https://freedomalliance.net.