Analysts discussed how the United States could prepare for a regime change in China.
WASHINGTON—The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) rule won’t last forever, and the United States should start preparing for the day when China is free of communism, said experts at a recent Hudson Institute event entitled “After the Fall: Planning for a Post-Communist China.
Having that discussion is essential, as a sudden regime collapse in China could also prove to be “very formidable,” said Miles Yu, former adviser to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute.
Decades of the CCP’s repressive rule have created “scars and institutional flaws that could be very dangerous to the rest of the world, too,” he said at the July 16 event.
“We have to think about the same kind of formidable task that the world faced after, say, the regime collapse of Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and even the collapse of Soviet communism in Eastern Europe,” he said.
In each instance, the United States dealt with the question of how to stabilize the country and “transition those societies into normal members of the international community,” he noted.
“This is basically on a much larger scale,” he said, likening the situation to a “political war game.”
A Regime in Paranoia
The prospect of the CCP’s fall isn’t all that remote, the experts said at the event.
China now faces a growing economic crisis, a hostile international environment, discontent over its human rights abuses, and political infighting.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping disappeared from public view for 14 days earlier this year and skipped the BRICS summit for the first time without explanation. A number of Xi loyalists have been ousted, a sign that Xi may be losing power.
“Totalitarian regimes can collapse anytime,” and the CCP thinks about that possibility all the time, Yu pointed out.
“Every day, it lives in paranoia,” he said.
Gordon Chang, senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute and author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” echoed Yu’s remarks, saying at the event that the communist authorities are “very, very insecure in Beijing.”
“Right now, we’re seeing the Communist Party [in] turmoil. Suppose the infighting gets worse, who knows what’s going to happen,” Chang told The Epoch Times.
The regime change could go from either top down or bottom up, he said, and there’s “only a million ways that this can happen.”
Chang pointed to the months-long protests in China in late 2022, sparked by widespread frustration at the regime’s harsh COVID-19 restrictions that deprived many of access to food and critical medicine. Protesters in some places went so far as to demand that the CCP step down.
“The Chinese people are not happy,” he said.
“The regime is putting so much effort into keeping China together; it means the place is unstable.”
Much like with East Germany and the Soviet Union, the CCP’s demise probably won’t happen in slow motion, Chang said.
“I think when it happens, we’re going to be taken by surprise,” he said. “All of a sudden, bam, it happens. That’s how these things play out.”
By Eva Fu and Frank Fang
