 Hi, I'm Mary Harrell for Tan Books. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principle driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. And this is certainly true of the leaders of communist China today and the dynasty that currently rules it. Talking about this topic today is Stephen Moser. Stephen is an internationally recognized authority on China and population issues, as well as an acclaimed author and speaker. He has worked tirelessly since 1979 to fight coercive population control programs and has helped hundreds of thousands of women and their families worldwide over the years. His new book today with Tian is The Devil and Communist China from Mao down to Xi. Stephen, thanks for joining us today. Well, thanks for having me on. Stephen, you truly know communist China from the inside out, but you're an American citizen. You weren't born there, you don't have heritage there. How did you come to know the country and all of its ills so intimately? Well, when I resigned my commission in the US Navy in 1976, I went to Hong Kong and studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Chinese language and history and culture. And then a couple of years later at Stanford University, I was chosen to be the first American social scientist since the 1940s to be allowed into China. I arrived in China in March of 1979 thanks to Deng Xiaoping himself. Now, how did the Chinese dictator take notice of me? Well, the issue was brought up by former president Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaoping said this American scholar will be welcome in China. So all doors were open to me. I went to Guangdong province in the South. I can read, write and speak Chinese. I was able to jump right into life in China from the get go. And what I found was that the Chinese Communist Party had brutalized the Chinese people for three decades. This was 1979, they'd taken the power in 1949. And what really opened my eyes was the beginning of the one child policy where women were rounded up and forced to have abortions. But I was also taken out to the mass grave sites outside the village where people who had opposed the Chinese Communist Party had been shot and buried. I was taken out to another mass grave site where hundreds of people who had died in the great famine caused by Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party in 1960 were buried. I was taken out to the local hill called Turtle Mountain where a supposed counter-revolutionaries were taken out and shot in the 1950s. It was a bloody history that was gradually revealed to me by the people of China. You know, the Chinese Communist Party claimed that it was getting rid of the old landlords and the capitalists. Well, you know what the people in rural China called the Chinese Communist Party? They called it the big landlord because it had taken over everything in China. And of course, the Chinese Communist Party was led by none other than the vicious Chairman Mao Zedong himself. Pee, were you shown these things out of pride by the government or were you showed to them by the people as liquid has been done to us in the last decade? Well, the people once they came to trust me began to tell me the dark horrible secrets of life under Communist rule. And so this was how I found out about all these atrocities that had been committed by the Chinese Communist Party. I mean, the principal myth of Communist China was that it improved life for the people. Well, in 1979, that wasn't true because people in 1979 and 1980 were telling me life had been better under the nationalist regime under the nationalist government in the 1930s and 40s than it was after 30 years of communism. That was another eye-opening statement. The Chinese Communist Party presents itself as a party of workers and peasants. It is not. It is a party of communist elites who have basically stolen the entire wealth of the country and treat the people of China, the masses as they call them, as a kind of disposable resource. And they have disposed literally of hundreds of millions of them over the last 70 years of their rule. Pee, to start really with the book and what you're covering in the book, the devil in Communist China, you're making a definitive connection here between Chinese leadership and the Prince of Darkness between Satan. Do you have an actual proof or any evidence of possession or even a formal connection between Mao? Was he a devil worshiper? Why do you make that connection so strongly? Well, I make that connection because Marxism in China has been a kind of dance of death, one that could only please the Prince of Darkness. Now, Paul Kanger in his book, Carl Marx and the devil and Carl Marx makes the point that the devil was literally in Marx's mind as he was writing his evil screed about communism. In Mao's case, it's interesting to me as a China scholar that when he was a little boy, his mother took him out to a local pagan god, a monolith outside the village that was said to be possessed by a spirit and consecrated him in a pagan ritual to this monolith. And she after that referred to him as the third son of the monolith. Now, I don't know whether that constitutes possession or not, but there was certainly an evil about Chairman Mao that you don't find replicated in very many human beings. At every point in his life, when he could choose between good and evil, he invariably chose evil. At every point in life, when he could choose between accomplishing some end by doing the right thing or doing a deceitful, underhanded thing that would result in death and injury. He always chose death and injury over light and goodness. So if he wasn't possessed, he might as well have been because he behaved as if he were in so many ways. In that line with Chairman Mao, he had an incredibly long reign of terror in his country, a little over 40 years, I believe you say in the book, and that's longer than Lenin and Stalin combined. And in that amount of time, as you say repeatedly, he had these bloody campaigns to target, to isolate, destroy different elements of Chinese society. Was his goal in this just to consolidate power and to get rid of all enemies? Is there another tangent of why his murder streak is so many millions of Chinese wide? Why he cut up such a wide swath of death on his reign of power during his reign? Well, that's a very interesting question. He did, his policies resulted in the death of what I estimate to be 500 million people. That's a half a billion people. Now I understand that's just a number. And it's a number so large that it's sort of people sort of, their eyes sort of glaze over. But the actual fact of the matter that each of these numbers was actually a living human being who was sacrificed unnecessarily by Mao in his unlimited drive for unlimited power. Anyone who got in Mao's way, he would seek revenge and retribution over time. Even his closest allies, people who had supported him for decades, like Joe Enlai, the former premier under Chairman Mao, who was the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. Joe Enlai was the premier of the communist regime in the 50s and 60s and 70s. You know, when Joe Enlai, Premier Joe, got liver cancer, bladder cancer, it was reported to Chairman Mao because Chairman Mao controlled medical care for all senior communist officials. And Chairman Mao said, don't treat the bladder cancer, don't treat the cancer, let it spread. So he deliberately led his closest comrade, someone who had fought beside him for decades, die a painful death from cancer. How evil do you have to be to carry out something like that? He was very skilled at doing what the Chinese call killing with a borrowed sword. He would, in the Civil War days, he would send off rivals with their armies into unwinnable battles in order to destroy their army. In fact, what he did with the nationalist army after the Civil War is striking to me because once the nationalists surrendered in 1949, most of their armies were intact. They went right over to the communists. They were enlisted in the communist armies. And what did Chairman Mao do? Again, he killed with a borrowed sword. He sent the nationalist armies which had been sworn into the Red Army into Korea to fight against us, to fight against the Americans and allowed the nationalist army soldiers and officers whom he did not trust to be killed by us in the Korean War and hundreds of thousands were, again, killing with a borrowed sword. Cold-blooded. Steve, when you consider China's one-child policy, you've spent an extensive amount of your career fighting population control just like this you see in China. As you said, 500 million people, Chinese killed by Mao, but 400 million of that, you say really could just be abortions and infanticide of children. So that's a staggering number. I think especially when you put into perspective that since 1973 in Roe v. Wade in America, only 63 million children killed here, 400 million. Does the weight of that kind of evil and the sheer numbers of that, when you're researching this and writing about it, does it ever just weigh you down? It's weighed me down since March of 1980 when I was in the operating room when women who were seven, eight and nine months pregnant were being forcibly aborted by communist doctors under guard, under duress, by Caesarean section abortions. It's weighed me down since I saw those babies killed by lethal injection shortly before after birth. That was the result of the one-child policy. I was in China when it began. And I saw these women arrested for the crime of being pregnant. Why was it a crime? Because the Chinese Communist Party had suddenly decided that there were too many babies being born in China. And so all of a sudden women who had six months before, eight months before conceived children when it was legal to have a second or third child were now suddenly told by communist officials, your pregnancy is illegal. We're going to arrest you for the crime of being pregnant and we're going to take you in for forced abortion and sterilization. And that's exactly what they did. I went with them on this sad Via de la Rosa that wound up with the death of their unborn child and the grievous wounding of the mother. Suicide rates among Chinese women in the 80s, 90s and up until a few years ago were very, very high because so many had been forced to be aborted late in pregnancy and really devastated psychologically as a result. This continued for decades and decades. And why? Because in 1958, Chairman Mao Zedong arguably the greatest mass murderer in human history declared that we need to regulate births in China in the same way we regulate the production in other sectors of the economy. In the same way we regulate the production of bicycles and tons of steel, we need to regulate human reproduction. And that's exactly what happened a few decades later. They began to regulate human reproduction and they've regulated 400 million little humans right out of existence. Now they have the opposite problem. They've killed off so many of the last two generations that China now has a birth dearth. China now has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. China has a population that's aging and dying more rapidly than any human population. Why? Because of this communist killing spree that resulted in the death of 400 million unborn Chinese babies. Because Dujie and the current ruling class of China, do they recognize this coming population bomb that this aging demographic that they created for themselves? Do they acknowledge this or is this something that we just purely can see outside numerically that this is obvious? Well, they've been acknowledging it for the last few years. In 2016, she desperately went to a two-child policy. He said to everyone in China, now you're free to have two children. They didn't. They didn't want any children or at most they wanted to stop at one. Two years ago, they decided to go to a three-child policy. Again, the new policy was met with a giant yawn. But again, the Chinese Communist Party, this diabolically controlled institution will not stop by simply saying to people, you're free to have children. They are now moving in the direction of forced pregnancy. They are now telling Communist Party officials, for example, and people in the military that they must marry and they must have at least three children. That policy, which is now instituted among Communist Party members and members of the People's Liberation Army, I believe will soon be expanded to the population as a whole. Young women will not have a choice. They will bear children for the Chinese Communist Party if the Chinese Communist Party decides that they must do so. This is a hellish regime which will stop at nothing to achieve its ends. And if it has decided that it has then the herd too much by killing off half of the last two generations, it will force the herd to grow by forcing young women to marry and have children one way or another. Even worse than I thought it was going to be talking about such evil. Steve, you make a startling connection at the beginning of the book, I think, between Chairman Mao and the devil about how Mao considered himself both lawless and godless. And you connect him with the Latin phrase, non-Servium. I hadn't made that connection before, but that's truly what Communism is, the replacement of religion and the will for anything divine, right? And making themselves the ultimate authority. Well, like Lucifer, the father of lies, Mao Zedong thrived on lying. And of course, other people have spoken of Communism as a culture of lies, but few communists could really achieve the level of Mao's deceit and deception. Like Lucifer, Mao built his kingdom entirely on lies. And the lie that he was gonna improve the life of the people when he actually wound up living like an emperor. The lie that people under Communism would find their lives greatly improved when actually they found themselves being really reduced to the status of nothing better than serfs. Serfs under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, slaves of the party who could be told where to go, where to live, how to live, how many children to have, what to eat and so forth. The level of control in China is just astonishing. They have more surveillance cameras than any other country in the world. They have more artificial intelligence, AI, monitoring what people do, controlling what people spend. They have a social credit system now, which is really a political credit system, which tracks everything you do and say on the internet. And if you become suspect by the regime, they lower your social credit so that you're not able to travel. You're not able to get a loan from a bank. You're not able to buy a house or a car. You become basically a non entity, a non person within the system itself. On the other hand, if you sing praises of the late chairman Mao and his successor, Xi Jinping, your social credit score goes up and all those things become possible for you. So this is a truly totalitarian system tyrannical system of total control of people, which aspires to keep everybody in tiny isolated cells of fear and tells them exactly how they are to live their lives every facet of their lives. The China wasn't always a communist country. And I don't, I was a communist before Chairman Mao came to power. What was the transition? No, the China was for a long time, of course, ruled by an emperor who claimed the kind of godlike status. But the Manchu dynasty, the Qing dynasty is the Chinese call it, fell in 1911. And after a few years, the warlord parade, we call it, the country began to be unified under the nationalist party which was founded by Sun Yat-sen and then led by Chiang Kai-shek. People don't know that Sun Yat-sen was an admirer of the American constitution. He lived in Hawaii. He wrote the Republic of China constitution model on our own. People don't know that Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist leader, was a committed Christian and wanted to encourage the practice of Christianity in his country. And so when we go back to Chairman Mao and the rise of the atheist communist party, this was another reason for the hatred of this diabolically inspired party, the Chinese Communist Party for the nationalist regime because there were so many Christians in the nationalist regime who were trying to improve the lives of the Chinese people and the nationalist regime itself was trying to emulate in some respects our own governmental system with its separation of powers and its protection for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The battle of course was lost not because of the nationalist failure as so much because the Soviet Union, the source of this evil of communism supplied Chairman Mao and his guerrillas with troops and tanks and arms, weapons of all kinds and trained them into a modern armed force that was able to conquer all of China. So the revolution that came to China was fostered and promoted by the evil of Soviet Russia. Steve, when you see the specter of communism raising its ugly head here in America or people either praising Xi or praising the possibility that again, communism just hasn't been done properly, right? And that's why it's failed. What do you scream in your mind when you hear people, so ignorant of history and ignorant of the bloody history of communism talking about it here in the United States? Well, there are a lot of people in this country who have been educated beyond their intelligence. I was at Stanford University in the late 1970s and there were openly communist professors on the faculty who sang the praises of red China who claimed to me that the Chinese Communist Party had actually been the best thing that had ever happened to the Chinese people. I had fortunately the experience of living and working in China and being able to speak the language and win the confidence of the local people. And so I was able to find out that that wasn't true in any respect. This is an evil system. It is a system that guarantees when it takes power that a tiny elite will ruthlessly control the much larger population. That human rights will be neglected, that mass murder will ensue and that people will lose whatever freedoms they had. Most educated people in this country, especially if they've graduated from our elite universities like Stanford, as I did like Yale or Harvard, will not know these things. Not only will they not know about the evils of communism, they will have been taught that it is a system that is admirable in many respects and that the only reason it's failed is that it has never been properly instituted. And so they fall again and again for this deceit, this deception that man himself can create heaven on earth. Man with the help of God can create a society where evils are restricted, but not totally eliminated. The drive for protection in this world, the drive for perfection in this world, the drive for to create heaven on earth always results in hell on earth and it has resulted in hell on earth in China. And I would suggest that if people, including those who have degrees from Harvard and Stanford and Yale would read my book, they would understand the truth about communism and not be so gullible and naive in the future as to believe the propaganda that comes out of that regime. We've got a question for you here. In the midst of all the death, murder, abortion, and fantasize that you discussed in the book and all the evil, all the associations with Satan and the communist dynasty in China, you have advice for your reader. You say, we should not be mesmerized by the horrors of communist China and all the death in the book. So what is the antidote? How do you keep, how should the reader keep a balance in their mind of peace away from all of that? What is the medicine for that? Well, here's what I had to do when I was writing the devil in Chinese communism. After spending a day immersed in the crimes of Chairman Mao against the Chinese people, the lies, the deceit, the killing, the torture and all of the other atrocities that were committed. I had to take a shower. I also had to read the Bible and look up in the Catechism the right way to behave. Because evil can have a terrible power over one's mind, of course, you don't wanna open the door to diabolical inspiration without turning immediately to Christ and reflecting on the good and the true and the beautiful. But it's also necessary, I think, for people to educate themselves about what is really going on in the world, not just in China and not just in countries around China where Chinese communism has spread. It's evil like North Korea, like Vietnam and Cambodia and other surrounding countries. But also realize that communism, the ideas of socialism and leftist, Marxist ideas, cultural Marxism has a strong hold on the minds of many people in the West, especially those who have been educated, as I say, beyond their intelligence. And so we need to familiarize ourselves with the danger lest we succumb to it. At the same time, we need to strengthen ourselves by reading scripture and praying as I do a daily rosary and doing reading, inspirational reading every night before I go to bed. It keeps me from having the nightmares that I would otherwise have from having been immersed in the evil of Chairman Mao's acts. Having seen them firsthand, I can't imagine what the nightmares you could have, but God bless you for exposing all of that evil to the world at large. Again, the book is The Devil and Communist China from Mao down to Xi. You can find it right here on tanbooks.com or ask about it at your local Catholic Book seller. Steve, thank you again for being such a strong voice against communism, against population control and abortion for all your work at PRI and for exposing again all of this to the world, the true nature of communism. And thank you for being with us today. Thank you.