“We Are The Good Guys”

Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI), Chairman of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, delivered a video address at VOC’s 2023 Captive Nations Summit in which he argued that there can be no equivalency between freedom and communism—we are the good guys.

Watch, and read, Rep. Gallagher’s full speech below.

The Victims of Communism hosted the first event that ranking member Krishnamoorthi and I did together for the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. At that event, we spoke with many of the victims of the CCP’s brutality. Their stories were harrowing. No one left that room the same as when they got there. It was a poignant reminder of what we’re up against.  

I’d like to start with five simple but radical words: We are the good guys. Much of media and academia in our own country have set out to convince you that the United States is a neo-colonial, racist hellscape with no moral authority to lead the free world.

It’s telling, however, that the Chinese Communist Party propaganda often just poorly regurgitates our own talking points. And while self-criticism is a vital part of democracy, we can’t lose track of the fact that we are the good guys.

As we combat the CCP in this new Cold War, our generation of leaders needs to relearn the lost art of ideological warfare. We need to communicate to the world not just how we win, but why we must win. We may call this a strategic competition, but it’s not a polite tennis match. The most fundamental human rights and freedoms are at stake.

Ideological warfare is about making sure people know the genocidal, techno-totalitarian truth about the Chinese Communist Party. Our contest with communism is not just about two different ways to organize economies, but an existential struggle for individual freedoms against totalitarian oppression.

At every opportunity, U.S. policymakers should highlight the cover-ups in Wuhan, the tyranny of Xi Jinping’s Zero-COVID policy, the broken promises in Hong Kong, the forced separation of children from families in Tibet, and the concentration camps of Xinjiang. 

These human rights abuses—and the all-pervasive surveillance state that enables them—are not accidents but rather the logical conclusion of the regime’s ideology. 

We must launch an ideological offensive and ensure the world knows this. To do so, first and foremost the United States must promote its values and track record, not be embarrassed by them. America’s values and its record spreading freedom and prosperity are an indispensable public diplomacy asset that the Chinese communist leaders cannot hope to match. Just look at the Korean Peninsula for proof of how America’s friends thrive, while China’s most ardent allies languish in poverty.

Even our former adversaries like Japan and Germany, once incorporated into the American-led international community have prospered economically and politically. Pax Americana has led to prosperity, enormous gains in life expectancy, and individual freedoms around the world. All the CCP has is a growing reputation for debt traps, economic coercion, and regional bullying. 

Secondly, the United States should make it more difficult for the CCP to use emerging technologies to control and repress its people and prevent American companies and investors from facilitating the CCP techno-totalitarian surveillance state. Congress should block U.S. exports and investments from supporting firms such as Weiwei, ZTE, Hikvision, and Sensetime and deny sales to them of critical technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

The private sector should chip in too. Silicon Valley should take a hard pass on technology partnerships with Chinese entities that are likely to exacerbate human rights abuses and promote the party’s surveillance state, and companies like Apple, Google, and others should refuse to comply with CCP censorship and surveillance orders. 

If we do our jobs waging ideological warfare properly, U.S. businesses will no longer be able to claim ignorance or excuse the CCP’s atrocities.

Finally, U.S. policymakers must differentiate between the Chinese people and the Chinese Communist Party. The United States must make it clear that it has no quarrel with the people of China, who are in fact the CCP’s primary victims. The truth is that the Chinese people and the American people are on the same side, because the CCP has made it clear that their vision for the Chinese people is the same as their vision for America in the world.

Above all, we must resist vigorously, ideologically, as well as economically and militarily, because as the famous Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, “the very ideology of communism, all Lenin’s teachings are that if you can take it, do so. If you can attack, strike. But if there’s a wall, then retreat.” The communist leaders respect only firmness and have contempt for persons who continually give in to them. 

We need to be like Solzhenitsyn’s wall: firm, self-assured, and resolute in the face of communist threats. But most of all, we need to be unshakable in our conviction that American freedom is our most precious possession and worth fighting for. 

On our worst day, we are miles better than the CCP. All of the Victims of Communism work shows that there is no moral equivalence that can be drawn. In other words, we are the good guys. And we’re going to win.”

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In the 118th Congress, Representative Gallagher serves as the Chairman of the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, as the Chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation, and on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.