Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, with a brazenness that defies decency, stood before Europe last week and all but confessed to China’s true strategic calculus. Beijing cannot afford a Russian defeat in Ukraine, Mr. Wang emphatically stated to the European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, lest a victorious United States turn its unencumbered gaze toward dealing with China.
In that one stunning admission, the Chinese Communist Party unmasked itself, revealing a worldview rooted in moral nihilism, ideological zealotry and ruthless self-preservation for global domination. China’s unwavering support for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s predatory war is the ultimate testament to its moral bankruptcy. Rather than siding with a sovereign nation defending its life and liberty, Beijing has chosen to back Moscow’s expansionism, cloaking it in the false narrative of being “cornered” by the United States. This is moral rot, plain and simple, the mindset of a thug dressed up in a diplomat’s suit.
Like a master propagandist, Mr. Wang deflected the CCP’s own moral failures onto America, as if it is somehow Washington’s fault that China props up Mr. Putin’s rampage. This is the Chinese Communist Party’s reflex: blame others for its own complicity and transform its disgrace into an accusation of its critics. Yet there is no excuse for aiding a regime that bombs maternity hospitals and forcibly deports children. The shame belongs solely to Beijing.
In the four-hour-long tense talks with Ms. Kallas in Brussels, Mr. Wang recycled the tired party line that the West, especially the United States, seeks to “contain” China, portraying the communist government as a victim, a purely defensive power. But China’s actions speak differently. Its military provocations in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea and even along the Himalayas show that its ambitions are hardly defensive. This “containment” gobbledygook is a rhetorical shield meant to recast aggression as victimhood and turn the arsonist into a fireman.
Mr. Wang again peddled the fiction that America is the world’s great destabilizer. He suggested that Russia’s war, China’s belligerence, North Korea’s missiles and Iran’s terrorism all flow from U.S. wrongdoing. This is ideological gaslighting on a global scale. Russia launched the largest land war in Europe since Hitler, China shreds treaties and agreements in the South China Sea, Iran funds terror, North Korea kidnaps and starves its people — yet Beijing dares to brand America the true villain? Such an inversion of reality recalls the darkest totalitarian playbooks of the 20th century.
In Brussels, Mr. Wang went further, subtly urging Europe to align with China against supposed American “hegemony,” pushing the lie that Europe’s problem is the United States, not Beijing or Moscow. This is a classic Leninist tactic: split your adversaries, fracture their alliances and seduce them with the illusion of common cause. If Europe is foolish enough to swallow this poison, it will find itself chained to a dictatorship that sees freedom as its mortal enemy.
Mr. Wang also repeated the narrative that the global contest is China versus the United States alone, as if this is a simple great-power rivalry. But the stakes are far broader. The real conflict is China versus the free, democratic world, the United States and Europe alike. The CCP wants to reduce other democracies to passive spectators while it builds a Eurasian sphere of influence with Russia as its proxy and its attack dog against world order.
In truth, Europe is no less threatened by China’s ambitions than the United States. America’s democracy is more than a rival. It is an existential threat to the Chinese dictatorship because it inspires the Chinese people with the vision of liberty under law. The CCP fears this deeply. The spark of freedom is its worst nightmare. It sees in a successful, confident America the model that could someday topple its own tyranny. That is why Beijing will always see American success as intolerable.
This hostility is not new. The CCP has viewed the United States as its ideological enemy since Mao Zedong’s day. Whether Washington’s approach was soft or harsh, Beijing’s attitude has been consistently antagonistic. Its Marxist-Leninist ideology cannot tolerate a thriving, competing democratic model. This enmity is woven into the party’s DNA. It is why, time and again, the darkest chapters in U.S.-China relations have originated with the CCP’s own actions, not America’s.
It was China that sent its soldiers to prop up Kim Il-Sung’s war in Korea, that gunned down its own youth in Tiananmen Square, that crushed Hong Kong’s autonomy, that threatens to obliterate Taiwan’s freedom. America’s China policy has varied, but the CCP’s warlike posture and ideological hostility toward the world’s oldest democracy has been a constant.
Ultimately, the decisive factor in U.S.-China relations has never been America, but the CCP itself. It is long past time for the world to recognize the agency and responsibility of the Chinese Communist Party in all of China’s bilateral and multilateral relations with the outside world. The CCP is a disciplined, Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party with a global vision. It is not merely reactive; it is proactive and dangerous. It does not wait for threats; it manufactures them.
Mr. Wang’s admission proved this beyond doubt. In that unguarded moment, he revealed that the party fears American victory because it fears what America represents (i.e., the moral challenge of liberty, the democratic spirit and the rule of law). It fears the collapse of Russia not simply because Russia is a partner, but also because Russia acts as a shield, protecting China’s own imperial dreams from American power.
If Europe fails to see this clearly, it risks repeating the blindness of the 1930s, mistaking a predator for a victim and letting propaganda obscure brute reality. Mr. Wang’s confession stands as a monument to the CCP’s moral decay, its relentless propaganda and its unrepentant hostility to the free world. It is high time to see the party for what it truly is: not the savior of global stability, but its most dangerous saboteur.