Having walked out of Chinese communist indoctrination, a scholar and historian hopes to offer the United States an antidote.
All Zhang Tianliang’s faith in the Communist Party crumbled right there, in a large state auditorium in Beijing.
They had all been waiting there, hundreds of them, shut inside since that sweltering morning in July 1999, bewildered.
It was the start of a bloody persecution, the likes of which had not been seen since the Cultural Revolution, although no one knew it at the time.
“Wait until 3 p.m. You will see it on TV,” the officers told them.
At 3 p.m. sharp came the revelation: Falun Gong, the spiritual practice they and millions of others had taken up, had been banned by Chinese leadership. As the crowd processed their shock, a state-run documentary began to play on the many television screens mounted to the ceiling, attacking the founder of Falun Gong, Mr. Li Hongzhi.
Of all the claims that set Zhang reeling, one was enough to undo his Party loyalty in one fell swoop: a short clip from a talk Li had given months prior that Zhang had watched in full. The snippet cut out a phrase midsentence, reversing Li’s meaning.
If the regime could alter a speech to fabricate incriminating evidence, what else was it capable of?
It hit Zhang that the Party might have been lying to him his whole life.
A year later, in 2000, Zhang escaped China for the United States. Twenty-six years later, he’s a Chinese history professor, political commentator, and co-author of several books on communism that have been translated into more than 20 languages. A talk show he appeared on, “Discussions on Chinese Communist Party Culture,” circulated around China via video copies and broadcasts and reached tens of millions of people, by his estimates.
His most recent endeavor is the English-language documentary “China’s Stealth Invasion,” which lays out all the infiltration tactics in Beijing’s tool chest. The film is described as “a high-stakes investigative documentary examining how the Chinese Communist Party may be exploiting America’s openness, institutions, and dependencies to expand influence from within.”
Zhang said America took him in when he was at his most vulnerable, and now that the freedoms of his second home are at stake, he sees an obligation to speak out.
“The Chinese Communist Party considers America as its biggest enemy,” he told The Epoch Times. “I can’t just watch it manipulate this country and erode its way of life.”
America Weaponized
From Mao Zedong’s famous dismissal of the United States as a “paper tiger” to Xi Jinping’s ambition for a global “community with a shared future,” successive Party leaders have vied for world domination.
Regardless of the packaging, the aim is the same: to export communist ideology around the world, Zhang said.
In 2024, Zhang saw that playing out right in front of his eyes—but this time on U.S. soil.
The pattern echoed the propaganda campaign he witnessed in China a quarter century ago. A negative media blitz, including a barrage of baseless claims of wrongdoing and extreme behavior, was launched against entities that Falun Gong practitioners started in the United States. Zhang struggled to wrap his mind around what he was seeing.
Then, in December 2024, an insider with access to the top Chinese political circle revealed the regime was running a new global influence operation. The strategy was to weaponize social media influencers, Western media outlets, and the U.S. legal system to malign and suppress Falun Gong in the United States.
Everything clicked in Zhang’s mind when he remembered a book written in 1991, “America Against America,” by Chinese political theorist and current Politburo member Wang Huning. The work, widely read in China, describes fragmentation and polarization dividing China’s greatest rival for world power, reinforcing the Chinese elites’ belief that the United States would inevitably decline.
That idea was pushed further by two Chinese military colonels in their 1999 book “Unrestricted Warfare.” The two laid out various nontraditional means that China could exploit to take down the much more powerful United States.
That’s it, Zhang thought—the Falun Gong community, numbering tens of millions in China and globally, had been a testing ground for the regime to sharpen its persecutory tools.
And what was taking place was just like what the Chinese elites envisioned, “American Institutions being weaponized against an American enterprise,” Zhang said.
That belief grew as new information surfaced.
By Eva Fu
