Mr. Xi’s another “red line” ? protecting the Chinese Communist Party’s political system ? exposes the regime’s underlying fragility. The regime thrives on control, yet its authoritarian model is crumbling under its own contradictions. Despite its propaganda, the party cannot hide the growing unrest among its citizens, who resent being treated as mere state tools. The party’s Achilles’ heel is its inability to offer legitimacy through consent. Its governance relies not on popular support but on surveillance, coercion and fear. Mr. Xi’s demand for respect for China’s political system is a plea for the world to turn a blind eye to these abuses. This strategy is doomed to fail as global scrutiny of the ruling party’s repression intensifies. China’s global soft power will suffer steady erosion. The party’s authoritarianism is increasingly viewed as a relic rather than a model for the future. Mr. Xi’s rhetoric around “development rights,” the last “red line,” is an Orwellian attempt to justify China’s predatory economic practices. For decades, the government has exploited global free trade systems while refusing to abide by the same rules. Intellectual property theft, forced technology transfers and economic coercion are hallmarks of its model. Under the guise of development, China seeks to entrench a planned economy within a global system it fundamentally undermines. This hypocrisy is laid bare as nations awaken to the dangers of Beijing’s economic imperialism. From the Belt and Road Initiative’s debt traps to its blatant currency manipulation, China’s economic strategy is increasingly viewed as a threat to global prosperity. Mr. Xi’s insistence on protecting these practices is less about development and more about preserving a system of exploitation.

Chinese Communist Party‘s history of ceding vast territory to ideological allies such as the Soviet Union and North Korea exposes its selective application of sovereignty. This double standard reveals that Taiwan’s importance to the Chinese Communist Party is not rooted in territorial integrity but in ideological desperation. Taiwan is a living repudiation of Beijing’s governance. Its democratic success and economic vibrancy starkly contrast with the authoritarian stagnation on the mainland. Taiwan is a beacon inspiring mainland citizens yearning for democracy. By framing Taiwan’s independence as a “red line,” Mr. Xi masks his fear of the Chinese government’s crumbling legitimacy and the erosion of his narrative of China’s invincibility. Mr. Xi’s demand for noninterference in democracy and human rights issues reflects the regime’s deepest fear. It is not a defense of sovereignty but an indictment of his regime’s repression. From the Tiananmen Square massacre to the silencing of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and the internment of millions of Uyghurs, the Communist Party’s record is one of systematic oppression. Mr. Xi’s paranoia stems from a well-founded fear of his own people. The party knows it governs a nation brimming with discontent, from the stifling censorship of the internet to the absence of basic freedoms. By branding democracy and human rights as foreign impositions, Mr. Xi seeks to delegitimize these universal principles, ensuring that his regime’s iron grip remains unchallenged. This tactic, however, is failing. The world increasingly sees China not as a sovereign defender but as a regime desperate to silence the voices of its own people.

What makes this cycle even more dangerous is the fundamental asymmetry in how the two nations approach diplomacy. America operates in the realm of the tangible: Identify the problem, negotiate the terms, implement the solution. China operates in the realm of perception, ideology and power. The message is always the same, America is to blame, China is the victim, and only the CCP, through the infallible wisdom of Mr. Xi, can lead the world to order and stability. This is not diplomacy. It’s deception. Mr. Xi doesn’t need a win at the negotiating table. He needs a photograph, a quote, a gesture ― something that can be packaged and broadcast to 1.4 billion people as proof that the world still bows to Zhongnanhai. Worse, if the summit is framed as a “reset” or a diplomatic breakthrough, it will embolden China and rattle U.S. allies, weaken deterrence and invite more aggression. The CCP reads softness as surrender and smiles as weakness. History offers no shortage of warnings, yet the lesson remains ignored: Summits on Mr. Xi’s terms serve the party, not peace. The contest between the United States and China is not a misunderstanding to be resolved over tea and handshakes. It is a confrontation between two irreconcilable systems ― one rooted in freedom, transparency and law, the other in control, surveillance and brute power. If the United States fails to recognize this, if it continues to indulge in the fantasy that diplomacy alone can tame a regime built on lies and fear, it will lose far more than face. The summit in Beijing is not a chance for detente. It is a test of will, and both sides must understand it.

A growing number of Chinese citizens see through the myth of infallibility, and Mr. Xi knows it. That is why a summit with the American president is so critical. It’s not about diplomacy. It’s about survival. To the Chinese people, the sight of the U.S. president standing with Mr. Xi will be broadcast as evidence that their leader is unchallenged and revered on the global stage. The illusion doesn’t stop at China’s borders. This summit is aimed squarely at America’s Asian allies: Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, India and Vietnam. These nations, all under increasing pressure from Beijing’s military and economic coercion, look to Washington as the sole counterweight to Chinese aggression. When the U.S. president appears in Beijing, smiling and shaking hands with the very man who threatens regional peace, it sends a chilling message. America will appease. Worse still, this entire pageant follows a familiar Chinese tactic: to escalate tension and then offer “cooperation” as the antidote. It’s a strategy born not of statesmanship but of Leninist manipulation. The desired outcome? Strategic concessions, rhetorical softening or mere moral equivalence. The ploy is remarkably effective. Previous U.S. administrations have leaped at the chance to establish crisis hotlines, resume dialogues or sign vague communique. Still, Beijing has a habit of ignoring those very hotlines when crises erupt. During the 1999 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and the 2001 EP-3 spy plane collision, Chinese generals simply refused to pick up the phone. These mechanisms exist not for crisis resolution but for public relations. They are bait, and Washington keeps biting.

President Trump accepted Xi Jinping’s invitation to visit Beijing soon. The U.S. president wants to use such a summit to solve specific problems with China, including fentanyl, rare earth materials and tariffs, and the Chinese Communist Party leader seeks to “reset” the entire U.S. policy toward the CCP. For Mr. Xi, such summits are not instruments of negotiation or goodwill. Every meeting staged on the CCP’s terms reinforces a regime bent on reshaping the global order in its authoritarian image. Summits, especially those held in China’s imperial capital city, have long been part of the CCP’s playbook for consolidating power at home and projecting strength abroad. Mao Zedong weaponized President Nixon’s 1972 visit to mask the devastation of the Cultural Revolution and restore his crumbling legitimacy. In 1978 and 1979, Deng Xiaoping successfully and cunningly played the “U.S. card” by manipulating the gullible President Carter into projecting him as the “paramount leader” of the CCP while Mr. Deng was immersed in a fierce but unsettled internal power struggle. After the bloodshed at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Chinese leaders again used American presidential engagements to legitimize their grip on power and whitewash atrocities. Mr. Xi is simply recycling this model with higher production value and greater ambition. Today, Mr. Xi faces a firestorm of his own making. His “zero-COVID” policy crippled the economy. His crackdown on private enterprises has driven away innovation and capital. Youth unemployment has soared. The property market teeters on collapse. The once-fabled “Chinese growth miracle” now limps behind a wall of state propaganda.

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. Like a master propagandist, China 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. China recycled the tired party line that the West, especially the United States, seeks to “contain” China, portraying the communist government as a victim. But China’s actions speak differently. Its military provocations in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea show that its ambitions are hardly defensive. China again peddled the fiction that America is the world’s great destabilizer. It 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. China went further, pushing the lie that Europe’s problem is the United States, not Beijing or Moscow.

On June 18, North Korea expressed its support for Iran in the latter’s conflict with Israel. In 1967, North Koreans flew alongside Syrian pilots during the Six-Day War against Israel. In 2007, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) destroyed a nuclear reactor North Koreans were building for the Assad regime in Syria. For several years, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un has been keeping the cauldrons of conflict at boiling point by threatening Israel and Ukraine through the exportation of tools of death. Why? The unquenchable need for hard cash. The strategic partnership between Iran and North Korea includes ideological and financial forces leading to the North Korea-Iran alliance, North Korean support for Iran’s proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, and the criminal financial networks that support this partnership. Iran needs North Korean ballistic missiles, other weapons and tunneling know-how to achieve its fundamental strategic objectives: regional hegemony and the extinction of the state of Israel. North Korea needs Iranian money to achieve its fundamental strategic objective: survival through the ultimate establishment of hegemony over the entire Korean peninsula. To achieve that goal, it needs money to keep its core elites happy and to continue developing its ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Today, amidst the wars and crises rampant in Ukraine, the Middle East and East Asia, we are witnessing an “axis of tyranny,” Iran, Russia, China and North Korea, wreaking havoc. Eliminating North Korea’s exportation of instability and violence will be a prerequisite for any hopes of lasting peace in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Northeast Asia.

The last thing that sexually dysphoric people need is “gender affirming care” and other euphemistic medical interventions by doctors who stand to profit from their misery ?for years. When you mess with nature, you invite lifelong dependency on drugs, hormone shots, psychiatric care and sometimes additional surgeries. This is the part the media leave out. Europe is ahead of America in turning away from these barbaric practices. The United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, Norway and France have put the brakes on such programs. Last year, Britain’s National Health Service released a four-year study headed by pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass that reads, in part, “The rationale for early puberty suppression remains unclear, with weak evidence regarding the impact on gender dysphoria, mental or psychosocial health.” People are waking up to the notion that they no longer have to accept woke madness. The Trump administration is warning hospitals that it may cut off federal funding if they continue sexual experiments on children and teenagers. If a doctor cut off a healthy arm or leg because a child identified as an amputee, would that be okay? The Justice Department and state and local authorities need to start arresting and prosecuting the so-called medical personnel doing these experiments. Republican-led states have enacted laws banning gender treatments on minors and barring males from competing on girls’ and women’s sports teams and accessing their bathrooms and locker rooms. Telling a mom or dad that their beloved child may commit suicide if they aren’t allowed to “transition” is emotional blackmail at its worst.

The Stanford Review detailed how a Chinese law enacted in 2017 mandates that all Chinese citizens support and cooperate with state intelligence work, regardless of location. Transnational repression and allegations of racial profiling have contributed to a pervasive culture of silence at Stanford and beyond. In 2022, the Biden administration ended the Justice Department’s China Initiative because of racial profiling concerns. President Trump created the initiative in 2018 to target Chinese trade secret theft at U.S. universities. Christopher Johnson, a former CIA analyst with extensive experience in China, told The New Yorker that Chinese spying at U.S. universities was a legitimate, “worrying” concern and “to compare it to a McCarthyist virus - I don’t see it that way.” When the China Initiative was launched in 2018, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified on the “naivete” of college administrators in admitting CCP agents. “The use of nontraditional collectors, especially in the academic setting - whether it’s professors, scientists, students - we see in almost every field office that the FBI has around the country,” he said. From 2018 to 2022, the FBI leveled multiple indictments at Chinese nationals on charges of spying or recruiting others to spy on behalf of China, all associated with U.S. colleges. Some of those indictments were dismissed and were exploited by the CCP to accuse the U.S. of racial discrimination, leading the Biden administration to abandon the China Initiative. Trump 2.0 has no such concerns. During a recent news briefing, the State Department said it would refuse to accept Beijing’s “exploitation” of American universities.

The CCP is working around the clock to deploy operatives and researchers to infiltrate American institutions and target our food supply, which would have grave consequences,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a recent statement. In 2020, the FBI reported that about half its nearly 5,000 counterintelligence cases involved China. Ian Mitch, a senior policy researcher at Rand Corp., warned in Newsweek in April that China’s spy network “may be developing the skills to physically sabotage critical infrastructure [in the U.S.] during a conflict.” In 2023, Politico reported that two Chinese were indicted on charges of operating an unlawful Chinese police station in Manhattan used to silence dissenters in the U.S. Chinese infiltration in our higher institutions ― stealing trade, intellectual property and other sensitive research ― remains the most nefarious and is why Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced last week that the U.S. government would “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.” Roughly 277,000 students from China attended school in the United States last year, down from a high of around 370,000 in 2019. Reuters reported that Chinese nationals constitute approximately 25% of all international students in the U.S. and 16% of all graduate STEM students. In May, the Stanford Review published an expose uncovering Chinese academic espionage at Stanford. The article said there are about “1,129 Chinese International students on campus, a select number are actively reporting to the Chinese Communist Party.”