Foreign Alibi Armory Disguised China’s Long March Into Night

Chinese people demonstrate during the "great proletarian Cultural Revolution" in front of the French embassy in Beijing on January 1967. Protesters show symbols of the Revolution such as the portrait of Mao Zedong, banners, and the book "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung." Since the cultural revolution was launched in May 1966 at Beijing University, Mao's aim was to recapture power after the failure of the "Great Leap Forward." The movement was directed against those "Party leaders in authority taking the capitalist road." Jean Vincent/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

Last year, Joe Biden’s comment that the Chinese “aren’t bad folks” and “not competition for us” created something of a stir, even among supporters of the Delaware Democrat. Some may be unaware that prominent Americans and Europeans have been overly kind to the Chinese communist regime for decades, as Paul Hollander chronicled in “Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba,” from Oxford University Press in 1981.