Hitler’s Nazi regime is almost universally regarded as a fully evil enterprise, with only scattered and marginalized outcasts who deny the monstrosity of the Holocaust or claim that the doctrine of Aryan racial superiority is a positive good. The Soviet Union and its seven-decade run elicit less unanimity among those who would call its reign evil — or an evil made necessary by the effort to bring communism to life.

The People’s Republic of China was once seen as evil. But then, for a time, it was a partner in trade, with that view waning such that it is now, once again, widely viewed as an evil regime — though not yet as widely as was the USSR and certainly not as was the Nazi state.

It’s against this ambivalence that Steven Mosher builds a compelling case in The Devil and Communist China. He convincingly argues that the evil practiced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) eclipses the evil wrought by the USSR, pointing out in the introduction that, per The Black Book of Communism, China was responsible for 65 million deaths, while the Soviet Union purged 20 million — then noting that China’s numbers don’t include the roughly 500 million unborn killed due to its one-child policy.

Mosher’s The Devil and Communist China offers a profound and chilling examination of the CCP’s history and its effect on the world. Mosher, leveraging decades of research, presents a meticulously documented account of the CCP’s reign, characterized by mass purges, starvation, and a relentless crush on dissent. Mosher draws a direct line from the ideological foundations laid by Karl Marx to the execution of these policies by Mao Zedong and his successors up to today’s paramount leader, Xi Jinping.

Mosher is uniquely positioned to see and to reveal these policies. He’s one of a handful of American China experts who’s studied in the country, learned the language, and has never fallen into the thrall of the CCP, nor has he had any false illusions about the CCP’s ability to reform itself into a democratic party,........

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