Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) compared President Ronald Reagan’s characterization of the Soviet Union to the reality of modern-day China, telling Breitbart News that the country is an “evil empire” and calling President Xi Jinping a “Marxist.”
Speaking to Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle at a Thursday policy event on the current and emerging threats presented by China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the senator referred to his book, Seven Things You Can’t Say About China.
Bringing up the first chapter of his book, called “China is an Evil Empire,” Cotton said he wrote that as an “obvious allusion to Ronald Reagan’s statement in 1983 that Soviet Russia was an evil empire that scandalized civilized Washington, but it was the truth — it’s still the truth about China today.”
“It’s still communist, even though it has adopted a lot of Western economic practices for its own socialist benefit,” the Arkansas Republican and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee stated.
“And Xi Jinping is a through-and-through Marxist — and there’s no doubt about that,” he added.
When asked about how the CCP tries to assert dominance over the world, Cotton said, “They put the party of all — above the state, above society, above God, and they do want to dominate the world. And what would domination look like? Look what they do to their own people.”
“They’ve been committing a slow-motion genocide in Tibet for 70 years, he continued. “They’ve been committing genocide fast-forward against the Uyghur people, a religious ethnic minority in northwest China.”
As Breitbart News’s Frances Martel detailed in a recent article reporting on China’s plan to expand road infrastructure in occupied East Turkistan and Tibet to increase its power over the region, the CCP has “aggressively persecuted the indigenous people of East Turkistan, the Uyghurs, and Tibetans.”
Martel explained:
In East Turkistan, Xi escalated the persecution to full-scale genocide including widespread forced sterilization campaigns, slavery, and organ harvesting. In Tibet, cultural eradication via mass abduction of children as well as campaigns to eliminate the Tibetan language and the local religion, Tibetan Buddhism, remain a constant threat to the population.
Cotton continued on to cite China’s oppression of Hong Kong, saying the communist government took away the Hongkongers’ “freedoms they enjoyed for centuries,” arguing that “This is what it would look like if they ran the world.”
China’s infamous Belt and Road Initiative “is just an example of how they’re trying to extend Communist Chinese influence around the world,” Cotton added.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
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