‘How are you going to expect a regime that’s conducting the largest-scale religious persecution to pave its own way to democracy?’ a China expert says.
As President Donald Trump pursues a trade deal with China, experts are cautioning that the regime has a history of breaking promises and it can’t be trusted.
The core reasons for the duplicity of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aren’t something that can be solved by skilled negotiation or statesmanship, they said, as they stem from the regime’s structure and ideology.
The CCP has been notorious for failing to honor major promises, said Bradley Thayer, co-author of “Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure” and member of the Committee on the Present Danger: China (CPDC).
“Lenin said, of course, that agreements were pie crusts for communists—they’re made to be broken,” he told The Epoch Times. “And I think we want to keep in mind Lenin’s aphorism when we’re thinking about the CCP.”
Off the top of his head, he listed several examples of the CCP breaking major promises and agreements.
The CCP never fulfilled its vow to liberalize access to China’s market upon its 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization, he noted.
The regime promised not to militarize the artificial islands it reclaimed in the South China Sea, yet it established military installations on them.
In 2020, Beijing enacted the Hong Kong National Security Law, which effectively nullified Hong Kong’s legal independence, despite the CCP’s promise upon acquiring the region from the UK in 1997 to keep its legal and political system intact for 50 years.
The CCP also failed to honor its 2020 trade agreement with the United States.
Promises of transparency after the regime’s 2003 SARS epidemic coverup went up in smoke with another coverup at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, he pointed out.
Several other China experts voiced a similar sentiment.
“Most Chinese people immediately know that China is not going to honor whatever they promise; we just know,” said Don Xiang, a China expert and host of the “Digging Into China” YouTube channel.
World leaders have repeatedly overlooked the CCP’s dishonesty in hopes that with economic progress, the regime will eventually reform itself. However, such expectations have always been unrealistic, the experts said.
“They’re thinking that making China richer, helping China become modernized, will actually change China’s political system—that has been proven to fail,” said Nan Su, a China commentator and senior editor of the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times.
The CCP’s brutal campaign launched in 1999 to eradicate the Falun Gong faith group, which had at least 70 million practitioners at the time, should have been a sufficient wake-up call, he said.
“How are you going to expect a regime that’s conducting the largest-scale religious persecution to pave its own way to democracy? Just impossible,” Nan said.
By Petr Svab
