— My letter to my representative in Australian parliament

Dear XXXX,

I am writing to you to urge Australia and her allies like America to prepare an effective and targeted strategy for the days after the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party, to avoid making the same mistake as after the fall of the Soviet Union — we allowed and even helped a much worse dictator, Putin, to fill the void.

I will reveal two crucial aspects of present-day Chinese mentality that westerners like you don’t know, which are so crucial in formulating our strategy.

Poisoning the Soil

Timothy Naftali, a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University, was a commentator in Netflix’s history series Turning Point. In episode 2, “Poisoning the Soil," on Stalin’s impact on Russia, he said:

“If you imagine the Earth, Stalin didn’t just kill the leaves, or the flowers, or the trees, or the first layer of Earth. He went really deep down. He ripped out the roots. A lot of them. I don’t think that any Russian ruler was as genocidal towards his own people as Stalin had been. He really went into the soil. And then poured incredibly poisonous stuff, really toxic material, into the soil to make sure that whatever he produced would be different from what it was before.“

Consequently, today’s Russia largely rallies around a depraved dictator and mass-murderer. It has nothing in common with Dmitri Shostakovich and Leo Tolstoy’s Russia.

What the CCP has done to China, which they are doubling down on with all the new technologies, is many times more thorough than what Stalin did to Russia.

In the thousands of years before the CCP took over, Chinese people sincerely believed and practiced the teachings of Confucius, 仁義禮智信, which are Kindness, Righteousness, Etiquette, Wisdom, and Faith. That was why, after the backward and staid Qing Dynasty collapsed in 1911, hundreds of brilliant and immortal educators, writers, philosophers, politicians, and engineers erupted in Chinese society. They had a commonality: they all dedicated their lives to advancing the greater good, with little interest in their personal gains.

The fingers of my right hand are superfluous to count such immortal giants after the CCP took over. After the death of Nobel Peace Prize winner Xiaobo Liu, I would argue that this breed has gone completely extinct.

I will give you three examples that happened to me.

In the last twenty years of her life, my grandma needed more and more care. Her niece Ming and his wife came from a remote rural region to take care of her. They did such a great job that the municipal council presented them with an award. I have four uncles, all well-educated elites. The poorest one owns a number of million-dollar apartments in Beijing, while the most well-off one is worth a few hundred million dollars. Due to the sacrifice of the Mings, they didn’t need to spend any time taking care of their mother. However, as soon as she died, they kicked the Mings out of grandma’s home, refusing to pay them a cent. Seeing such outrageous treatment of the Mings, I advocated for them and demanded that they be treated equally as one of the children of my grandma when dividing the roughly $1 million inheritance she left.

Because of this, my uncles kindly asked my dad:

“XXX (me) wasn’t this irrational and crazy before he went abroad. What happened to him? Has he experienced traumas in Australia? He needs help."

My childhood best friend lived in China. He is also a university-educated elite working as a mid-level manager in a large business. I found him drifting away from me in the last few years. After repeatedly grilling him, I realized why.

In one of the visits I made back to Beijing, I told him that, during the period when Chinese baby formulas were found to contain poisonous chemicals and Chinese migrants in Australia emptied supermarket shelves of baby formula to send to China, a close friend of mine, also a Chinese migrant, could not find formula for her baby, and it made her postpartum anxiety much worse. I thus wrote to my MP and suggested putting a quota on people buying baby formula to ship overseas. The MP then discussed this with the attorney general and told me the result. I told this friend because I wanted to show him that every Australian citizen’s opinion counts.

I never felt the need to justify what I did — the amount of baby formula in the Australian market is for 20 million people, not for 1.4 billion.

But he regarded me as a traitor to the nation. To him, to be a patriot, I needed to stay loyal to the party and do everything to advance the interests of the mother nation in Australia, meanwhile watching in cold blood as my fellow countrywoman’s baby starved.

Confucius said, “己所不欲, 勿施於人, Do not impose on others what you do not desire for yourself". My friend had obviously forgotten it.

There are always selfish and crooked people in any society, but one in which the top elites proudly believe that what my uncles did was righteous, and what I did was irrational, crazy, and traitorous, is a phenomenon only seen in today’s China. It shows how thoroughly the CCP has poisoned the soil.

“You are too biased. The Chinese I have been dealing with are not like what you described." I hear you say.

Only a couple of days ago, at a Christmas party of my Chinese church, I happened to be chatting with two young men in their late thirties or early forties, who migrated to Australia from China some twenty years ago and were both working as IT professionals. The conversation somehow veered into the Ukraine war, and I was stunned to hear that they were both staunch supporters of Russia.

They kept repeating the lines of CCP propaganda: that the US was a robber who went everywhere to commit robberies, that it deliberately provoked Russia, who had every right to invade Ukraine in self-defence, and that the US wanted the war so it could sell its weapons. I kept using facts to prove these accusations wrong and kept asking them to provide facts to back their claims. Every time I responded to one accusation, they immediately moved on to another. It was like guerrilla warfare — every time they attacked one target, I committed to the battle, only to find them disappearing to attack another.

It was clear to me that the reason they could not defend any of their accusations, yet kept accusing, was that deep down they had one fundamental conviction, which they knew was indefensible: that if they were stronger than you, you must submit; otherwise, they had every right to invade and slaughter you.

These two young men are the nicest in our cell group. They show up an hour earlier every Sunday to get everything ready for the worship and operate the slides during the service. They do the dishwashing and clean up after the service. They are very gentle and humble, always eager to help others. They had helped me many times, whenever I ask, they are always there. They are absolutely the nicest kind of human beings by the standard of every culture. And yet, they support Russia’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine, and they will undoubtedly support China’s invasion of Taiwan, and, if the Taiwanese resist, any brutal act by the invasion force on them.

Even the nicest mainland Chinese have the same conviction— the rule of the jungle. That was all they could absorb from that poisoned soil.

If the nicest young Chinese who have lived in a democratic country for twenty years are like that, what can we expect of the 1.4 billion Chinese living in China?

The headwind we the West are facing does not come from CCP alone. It comes from the 1.4 billion Chinese.

Why do Chinese People Worship Mao?

Chairman Mao is worshipped by the lower 90% of the Chinese population as the founding father of the great China that proudly stood up to western bullies. Many worship him as a god. They hang his miniature statue on the rear-view mirrors of their cars because they believe he can protect them from harm. When they suffer horrific injustice and no one listens to them, they kneel before his portrait and cry to him.

Don’t they know that Mao killed forty million Chinese during the “Great Leap Forward" and the “Great Cultural Revolution"?

Yes, they do.

This is the biggest difference in fundamental value paradigms between the West and the Chinese and Russians.

In the West, we believe that the means are important. In China and Russia, they believe the end justifies the means. They adore strongmen. Great emperors ought to kill millions on their path to great dynasties. Deception and extreme cruelty demonstrate their prowess and these are part of the reasons why they were adored.

In comparison, a leader who loses the struggle to the throne because he had mercy on his enemy or refused to backstab an ally is regarded as a weak loser. He will be used as a bad example to educate posterity. They have a special term for it, “婦人之仁,” which means “the weakness of a woman."

I know all this because, even in the first decade after I migrated to Australia, I worshipped Mao for exactly these reasons. It took me a decade to be assimilated into western values.

The next ruler will be much worse

I was once in a WeChat group of about 200 Chinese elites who were all fiercely anti-CCP. That was why they formed this group, which had been shut down 33 times when I joined. They were famous movie directors, producers, architects, and prominent businessmen. The level of intolerance, paranoia, and hatred these people exhibited toward those with harmlessly different opinions made me shudder — I have no doubt that if they succeed the CCP as rulers of China, there would be much more bloodshed and incarcerations as they ruthlessly avenge their scores and eliminate anyone they perceive as an obstacle.

This was exactly why Putin is much worse than Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Because the barren and poisonous soil just can’t yield anything good. The concepts of graciousness that we westerners know had been completely and deliberately purged — where does one learn such things when he grows up?

Therefore, the West must know that it is almost inevitable that, after the CCP collapses, those who replace them will be much worse.

What should be our strategy to deal with China after the CCP falls?

So, how do we prevent another Chinese Putin from starting World War IV (we are currently in the beginning of World War III)?

We should keep in mind that all Chinese people understand is brute strength.

You might think that an act of restraint, a step back when you are already at the throat of your enemy demonstrates your sincere goodwill, and you assume that it will be appreciated.

But hell no!

To them, it is interpreted as weakness and folly.

This was why, when Hillary Clinton presented the big red reset button to Putin, meaning “let’s start over," he thought it was a joke and repaid this folly with the invasion of Georgia and Ukraine.

Therefore, the worst mistake the West can make, when facing the new Chinese ruler, is to show him plenty of goodwill, lift all sanctions, and open our markets to them.

Because this would enable the Chinese Putin to tell his people:

“See? I am your new powerful emperor! Even the West respects me!"

This would be a great help for him to concentrate and consolidate his power as the new dictator.

Once he achieves this, he wouldn’t want his people to view the West as a better alternative, so he has to make the West their archenemy.

This is why Putin made the West Russia’s archenemy, not because the West threatened him. He needed the West to be Russia’s enemy.

Therefore, the right thing for the West to do, after the CCP’s collapse, is to keep up the pressure.

We give the new ruler one condition to lift all the sanctions and normalize the relationship: to have a democratic constitution. The most important pillar of a democratic constitution is a completely free press. All other pillars are useless without a free press. It is crucial to prevent him from using the press to spread lies that the West is threatening or harming China.

So, we keep up the pressure. Chinese people will continue to feel it. This is the only way they can respect the West and see the relative powerlessness of their ruler.

I know that every western strategist would worry that this continuous pressure will turn the new leader into an enemy. Yes it is possible. But not doing so are more likely to achieve this outcome.

Believe it or not, the Chinese people will not hate the West for this. Instead, they will adore the West, just like they had adored all strongmen who had the power to give them hell.

Then, after a democratic constitution has been installed, and a truly free press has been busy, when reflections have been done by all the Chinese people — just like what I did in the second decade after I arrived in Australia — when they have seen the benefits of democracy and the harm of dictatorship, when the parties are truly competing in fair elections, we lift the sanctions and embrace a new member of humanity.

This would be the best thing we can do for the Chinese people and the whole of mankind.