China a Tougher Foe Than the Soviet Union, Diplomats Told at Memorial to Communism’s Victims

The Chinese regime is ‘at war with God,’ former U.S. ambassador Sam Brownback said, urging Washington to confront Beijing as Reagan did Moscow.

Former U.S. Ambassador Sam Brownback speaks at the 19th Annual Roll Call of Nations Wreath Laying Ceremony, attended by representatives from more than 60 embassies and groups, at the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington on April 23, 2026. The Epoch Times

WASHINGTON—Former U.S. Ambassador for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback has delivered a stark warning to diplomats and human rights advocates that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) poses a greater threat than the Soviet Union ever did—and is at war with faith itself.

“They are at war with God,” Brownback said in a keynote address last week. “It is a war they will not win.”

His remarks came during the 19th Annual Roll Call of Nations Wreath Laying Ceremony, hosted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC). Representatives from more than 60 embassies, captive nations, and human rights organizations laid wreaths in honor of the more than 100 million people killed under communist regimes since 1917—and the roughly 1.5 billion who, according to the foundation, still live under such rule today.

A ‘Collision Course’

Brownback, who also served as governor of Kansas and a U.S. senator, reflected on his first encounter with communism in 1977, when he traveled to the Soviet Union as a young Future Farmers of America officer. He recalled visiting a Baptist church in Moscow that authorities insisted did not exist, where worshipers stood through two-hour services using handwritten hymnals simply to connect with God.

The Soviet Union ultimately collapsed, he said, but the United States now faces a more formidable adversary in Beijing.

He pointed to a military parade in Beijing last September, where Chinese leader Xi Jinping stood alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un—among leaders from 26 nations who attended. Brownback described the gathering—widely viewed as a show of alignment against the United States—as an “evil alliance.”

“If that didn’t send chills down your spine, it should have,” Brownback said. “They are at war with us, whether we believe it or not.”

The CCP has a “glass jaw,” Brownback said—“and it’s faith. It’s religion.”

“They cannot tolerate a system that recognizes a higher authority than the government,” he said. Pastors have been imprisoned or “disappeared,” parents cannot legally name a child Mohammed, and even owning an image of the Dalai Lama is forbidden.

He pointed to the persecution of the spiritual group Falun Gong in China and the forced harvesting of organs from living practitioners—a crime he said was so horrific that even medieval regimes had not conceived of it.

“There are an estimated 100 million Christians in China today,” Brownback said. “Falun Gong had [about] 90 million practitioners when they were allowed to freely practice.”

The CCP, he said, has “killed more of its own people than any regime in the history of mankind,” and is currently committing three genocides within its borders—while the United States continues to trade with Beijing as if none of it were happening.

Brownback urged Washington to take a page from former President Ronald Reagan’s playbook in confronting the Soviet Union. Reagan, he said, rejected the idea of peaceful coexistence and declared that the two systems were on “a complete collision course.”

“The answer,” Brownback said, “must be: We win, they lose.”

Crimes Past and Present

VOC President and CEO Eric Patterson opened the ceremony by referencing a New York Times front-page investigation published that morning. Conducted in partnership with the Campaign for Uyghurs and informed by VOC research, the report found that popular Pop Mart Labubu dolls sold across the United States contain cotton traced to Xinjiang—where, the foundation says, up to 3 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities face state-imposed forced labor.

In an interview with The Epoch Times, Patterson said the ceremony served not only as a memorial, but also as a confrontation with ongoing abuses.

The annual gathering, he said, was about “standing witness against the crimes of communism today”—including the persecution of “Christians and Falun Gong and Muslim Uyghurs and others in China,” as well as repression in North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Eritrea, and other communist or post-communist states.

The foundation’s role, he said, is to put those regimes on notice, push policymakers and media in the West to respond, and educate younger generations to recognize “statist, anti-family, anti-human forms of ideology” before they take hold.

While the day centered on remembrance, Patterson said it was also “a time for thinking about victory,” pointing to the 1989 collapse of communist regimes in Poland and Romania as cause for hope.

The Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington on April 23, 2026. The memorial, a replica of the Goddess of Democracy statue erected by Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989, honors the more than 100 million people killed under communist regimes since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The Epoch Times

The Fall of Dictators

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), co-chair of the VOC Congressional Caucus and the U.S. Helsinki Commission, said unity against authoritarian regimes is at its highest point in his lifetime.

“The number of dictators has been reduced by three,” Wilson told the audience, pointing to the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the removal of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, and the elimination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Wilson said he had been declared an enemy of the state by the Assad regime in November 2024. Eight months later, he recounted, he was sitting in Assad’s former Damascus office with Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who in November 2025 became the first Syrian head of state to visit the White House.

Maduro’s removal, he said, was carried out without American loss of life and exposed the limits of Russian anti-aircraft systems, Chinese radar, and Cuban mercenary forces.

Of Iran, Wilson added: “I’ve never heard of the leadership of an enemy country to be eliminated, killed in the first one minute of a conflict.” Khamenei’s removal, he said, would open the door for the Iranian people to build a government respected by the international community.

He also expressed hope that developments in Venezuela could create ripple effects in Cuba.

Warning to a New Generation

VOC Board Chair Dr. Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, founding director of the Victims of Communism Museum, presented the foundation’s 2026 Flame of Liberty Award to the Viet American Foundation for its decades-long work preserving the truth about life under Vietnamese communism.

“Communism is evil, the privation of the good,” Spalding said.

She said the ideology survives by eliminating, repressing, or co-opting the institutions that expose its lies—private property, family, religion, and nation.

Hoàng Vi Kha, who escaped Vietnam in 1989 on a small fishing boat with 13 others and now serves as principal of the Tang Long Vietnamese language center in Falls Church, Virginia, accepted the award.

“Communism is not gone. This has not faded into history,” he told the audience. “It survives. It rebranded, repackaged.”

He warned young people in free societies not to be misled by language that may “sound compassionate” but “conceal control.”

In an interview with The Epoch Times, Hoàng said that while regimes in China, Vietnam, and North Korea may appear different from decades past, their core remains unchanged—dissent is silenced, and civil rights are denied.

“They make the cage more beautiful outside,” he said, “but we stay inside the cage.”

In his remarks at the ceremony, Hoàng also said the torch held high by the Statue of Liberty reminded him of the Goddess of Democracy at the memorial. Freedom, he said, is never guaranteed; it requires courage and constant resilience.

The question, he said, is no longer what communism was, but whether people can still recognize it when it returns.

“Evil rarely returns as itself,” Hoàng said. “It returns as something we are willing to accept.”

The Roll Call of Nations has been held annually since the Victims of Communism Memorial was dedicated in 2007. Brownback’s new book on China and religious freedom is set to launch at the VOC Museum on May 13.