If the 2012 book The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers – A Revelatory Inside Look at the CCP’s Grip on Power got people startled, and 2015’s book, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China asked many questions such as, Why does a government with more success lifting people from poverty than any civilization in history choose to put strict restraints on freedom of expression? Why do millions of young Chinese professionals-fluent in English and devoted to Western pop culture-consider themselves “angry youth,” dedicated to resisting the West’s influence? How are Chinese from all strata finding meaning after two decades of the relentless pursuit of wealth? Then by the time of 2020, when COVID-19 overruled the world, How The Specter of Communism is Ruling Our World(2020) gave us the full picture of what Communist Party’s true identity. Written by the Editorial Board of Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party(2020), it dwells deep into the last 80-year history of the CCP, its lies, dictatorship, various political movements and crackdowns have wreaked unprecedented havoc in the land of China and caused irrevocable destruction to the traditional values and morality of the Chinese nation. And more recently,, shows how the Communist Party controls the government, courts, media, and military and keeps all corruption accusations against its members in-house. The Party’s decisions have a global impact, yet the CCP remains a deeply secretive body, hostile to the law and unaccountable to anyone or anything other than its own internal tribunals. These crimes validates from another angle the points illustrated in the book, The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism’s Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration (2020) by Paul Kengor.

Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment (2025) by Robert George, is collection of essays challenges the “Age of Feeling” by appealing to reason in the pursuit of sound moral understanding on crucial and contentious topics of human dignity, the definition of marriage, philosophy of law, constitutional law, the nature of civil liberties, free markets, and others. There is a chapter talking about Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet and Russian author and dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system. Most famous for the novel, The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn later won Nobel Prize and was invited to Harvard to gave speech in 1978. Solzhenitsyn criticized the Western democracies apparently cared little about how many died in the East, as long as they could end the war quickly and painlessly for themselves in the West. He argued that the United States had declined in terms of its “spiritual life” and called for a “spiritual upsurge”. He added “should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively”. He critiqued the West for its lack of religiosity, materialism, and a “decline in courage”. Western misunderstanding with itself results from measuring the world by the “Western yardstick.” Solzhenitsyn’s message was not well received at that time, but it definitely worth reconsidering now.

This youtube program, The Hidden Secret of Lop Nur Nuclear Tests, discuss why some Kazakhs who had lived and worked in China—and in some cases even joined the Communist Party—later choose to leave for Kazakhstan? Wang draws on years of research, personal contacts, and fieldwork to examine a subject that has received very little attention in the Chinese-speaking world: the possible long-term impact of nuclear testing at Lop Nur on nearby Kazakh communities. He discusses reports of cancer and other health concerns in communities near the testing area, as well as the role that Kazakhstan’s independence, renewed cross-border family ties, and changes in China’s ethnic and religious policies played in encouraging migration. For many who left, the decision was not simply about better material conditions. Wang describes how some migrants valued greater freedom of thought and expression, access to education and healthcare, voting rights, and the experience of being treated as equal citizens.

The Xinjiang emergency: Exploring the causes and consequences of China’s mass detention of Uyghurs (2022) estimate that since 2016 one million people have been detained there without trial. In the detention centres individuals are exposed to deeply invasive forms of surveillance and psychological stress, while outside them more than ten million Turkic Muslim minorities are subjected to a network of hi-tech surveillance systems, checkpoints and interpersonal monitoring. The Xinjiang Procedure (2026) reports Chinese government transplant surgeons surgically extracting Uyghur organs while their hearts are still beating, average age, 28 years old. Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide (2023) was a personal account of the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group in western China, were experiencing an echo of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, amplified by China’s establishment of an all-seeing high-tech surveillance state. Over a million people have vanished into China’s internment camps for Muslim minorities. All these stories revealed atrocity happening in our world. Similarly,Red Roulette: An Insider’s Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today’s China, as well as Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice, both are stories about accidental activism, unveil a glimpse of the dark side of authoritarian government.

These reminds me a quotes from Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen that best illuminate the issue at the core:

“The modern world, which denies personal guilt and admits only social crimes, which has no place for personal repentance but only public reforms, has divorced Christ from His Cross; the Bridegroom and Bride have been pulled apart. What God hath joined together, men have torn asunder. As a result, to the left is the Cross; to the right is Christ. Each has awaited new partners who will pick them up in a kind of second and adulterous union. Communism comes along and picks up the meaningless Cross; Western post-Christian civilization chooses the unscarred Christ.

Communism has chosen the Cross in the sense that it has brought back to an egotistic world a sense of discipline, self-abnegation, surrender, hard work, study, and dedication to supra-individual goals. But the Cross without Christ is sacrifice without love. Hence, Communism has produced a society that is authoritarian, cruel, oppressive of human freedom, filled with concentration camps, firing squads, and brain-washings.

The Western post-Christian civilization has picked up the Christ without His Cross. But a Christ without a sacrifice that reconciles the world to God is a cheap, feminized, colourless, itinerant preacher who deserves to be popular for His great Sermon on the Mount, but also merits unpopularity for what He said about His Divinity on the one hand, and divorce, judgment, and hell on the other. This sentimental Christ is patched together with a thousand commonplaces, sustained sometimes by academic etymologists who cannot see the Word for the letters, or distorted beyond personal recognition by a dogmatic principle that anything which is Divine must necessarily be a myth. Without His Cross, He becomes nothing more than a sultry precursor of democracy or a humanitarian who taught brotherhood without tears.”

Will Ukraine be able to get support from Turkey – a country which had been the bridge between East and West for centuries in negotiation with Russia for a reasonable peace treaty through the church?

The Fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Ottoman  was a watershed moment of the Late Middle Ages, marking the effective end of the Roman Empire, a state which began in roughly 27 BC and had lasted nearly 1,500 years. Byzantium Empire (also known as Eastern Roman Empire), centred on Constantinople, had been ruling Mediterranean area stretched across Europe, North Africa and western Asia since its founding in 324, the time of emperor Constantine, who fatefully moved his capital from central Italy to the early Greek settlement of Byzantion at Europe’s southest tip. Major religious traditions include Judaism, Latin Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, and Islam.

And it is said, theologically and politically, according to the concept of Moscow, the Third Rome,  Moscow is the successor to Rome and Constantinople as the center of Orthodox Christianity. The idea emerged in the late 15th and early 16th centuries after the Fall of Constantinople (1453), receiving its classic formulation in the epistles of the monk Philotheus of Pskov, who stated that “two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and a fourth there shall not be.“

A fourth party, Iran can be see from the context discussed in this article: IRAN, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE, AND THE WEST: SECTARIAN DIVIDE, BORDERLANDS, AND DIPLOMACY, which brings historians of Ottoman empire and Iran together to a shed new light on the history of Ottoman-Iranian relations, borderlands, and Iranian shi’i communities in the Ottoman empire based on both Ottoman archival, European, and Persian sources.  The sectarian violence in the Middle East is seldom traced to imperial rivalries in the sixteenth century, when the rise of Safavid state in 1501 led to two centuries of warfare, militarization, conquest and religious persecution of sunnis in Iran and shi’i Qizilbash in the Ottoman empire. Moreover, few historians have studied these religious and political conflicts in the wider Mediterranean and European contexts or have compared them with the reformation in Europe and the rise of national states. There is no doubt that the establishment of twelver shi’ism in Iran helped ward off Ottoman expansion into Azerbaijan although this borderland region was occupied several times and suffered economic by the Ottomans. Numerous peace treaties signed between these two states did not end the wars until the treaty of Erzurum signed between the Qajar and Ottoman states in 1829 ended hostilities and set the borders. 

Is the idea too much of a wishful thinking? The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative had been craving for the cross-way through Iran and Middle east to Europe. Beijing has expanded its presence through trade, investment, energy ties, and the Belt and Road Initiative—but cooperation between governments does not necessarily mean trust or identification at the level of ordinary people. Is there anyway, the four parties can form some kind of agreement? And let’s also pray for the end of wars, and the liberation of Uyghurs from the CCP.