Don’t miss my analysis of the growing Chinese demographic collapse.
This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.
Our full discussion transcribed after the break:
by Rod D. Martin
October 5, 2026
Seventy-seven years after the fall of China, I appeared on NTD Newsroom with host Don Ma to discuss how Taiwan shows what was lost — and how peace through strength offers a path to the freedom the Chinese people were denied.
(This interview aired live on October 1, the seventy-seventh anniversary of the fall of China to the Communists.)
Don and I discuss:
Why America abandoned an ally and empowered the rise of Communist China.
The consequences: Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia.
How Taiwan shows what a free China could have achieved, and may yet.
How trade enriched the regime without producing liberty, and thus increased the threat.
How Trump is applying Reagan’s Cold War strategy to defeat the Soviet Union.
It’s 20 minutes of the in-depth analysis you need: watch it, and pass it along!
Nothing matters more than educating the next generation with the values we cherish. The Herzog Foundation is making that possible. Learn more here.
Our Full Discussion:
Don Ma: 27 years ago, our next guest wrote an article on how the failure of America helped the Chinese regime get in power, which led to the retreat of the Republic of China to Taiwan. Here to talk to us about these events is Rod Martin, political analyst and founder and CEO of Martin Capital. So, Rod, welcome. As always, thank you for being here with us. So October 1st, looking back to a time in history that led to the establishment of the Republic of China in 1949, many people today may not be too familiar with America’s involvement in this. What responsibility does America bear in your view?
Rod D. Martin: Well, obviously, very few people living have any responsibility for it. But I think we have a very heavy moral burden with regard to the people of China. And one that we need to be very mindful of.
Mao’s regime came in and, in pretty rapid order, murdered 65 million of its own people. The Chinese have killed more of their own people than died in all of World War II. It’s just horrific what has happened.
And the second and third order consequences just keep rolling. Immediately after the fall of China to the communists, you get the Korean War and the Chinese invasion of Korea. And then you get the Vietnam War, which wouldn’t have happened but for the fall of China. And you get the genocide in Cambodia, where Pol Pot, with full support of Beijing, murdered a third of his population in just under three years.
And you have the ongoing problems we have now with a nuclear arms race, a naval race, all of the different problems that have happened across the world because the communists were able to take power.
And the sad but true part of that is China was our close ally during World War II. We had a long, long relationship with China going back a century at that point that was incredibly cordial, incredibly positive for both countries. And Roosevelt believed in Chinese freedom. Franklin Roosevelt, whatever his issues, was really great on some things. And one of those things was the belief that China was a rising power. It was a rising democracy. It was going to be a model for the world.
It just had to get past the 40 years of civil war it had been wracked by, not to mention the decades of invasion by the Japanese. And he believed in it. That’s why China got a permanent Security Council seat at the UN. That’s why a lot of things we did in that era happened the way they did.
And then Roosevelt died. And Harry Truman did not see things that way. And Harry Truman listened to some people who were heavily influenced by the communists in China, not necessarily because they were collaborating, but influenced. And you had a lot of propaganda in the West in favor of Mao as “the George Washington of China.” It was just absurd. But that’s how a lot of people portrayed it.
And ultimately, after General George C. Marshall’s tour of China in 1948, and his resulting assessment of the Chinese situation in what was called “the White Paper”, the American government increasingly withdrew support from Chiang Kai-shek. China was lost within a year. Just one of the supreme tragedies of history.
Chiang Kai-shek, Civil War, and American Abandonment
Don Ma: Can you speak specifically as well, since you bring up Chiang Kai-shek, and how the U.S. failed him specifically?
Rod D. Martin: Chiang was doing the best he could with a very, very bad situation. Chiang came to power during the Civil War. And people aren’t as familiar with the warlord period as they were back then. But, you know, China had broken into parts. After the Chinese Revolution in 1911, Sun Yat-sen ushered in the Republic of China. Pretty quickly thereafter, the country spun apart into warlord areas that loosely were part of the same country, but functionally were not. And in the middle of that, you get the rise of the Communist Party as a direct result of the Communist victory in Russia.
So the Chinese Communist Party becomes a major force and one of the key players in a civil war that lasts from just after the Chinese Revolution in 1911 all the way to 1949.
Then the Japanese invade in 1931, take Manchuria and turn it into a puppet state. Then the Japanese invade the rest of China in 1937, one of the most murderous and barbaric wars in human history. At Nanjing alone, which at the time was the capital of the Republic of China, the Japanese raped and murdered over 300,000 people hand-to-hand.
We’re not talking about aerial bombing. We’re not talking nuclear war. We’re talking about hand-to-hand just destroying a city and its people. And that’s just one of the many atrocities that the Japanese carried out during that war.
Now, in the middle of that, Democrats in the United States in the late forties somehow got it in their head that Chiang Kai-shek was supposed to be this perfect democrat. And the democracy in China was supposed to magically work every bit as well as the democracy in the United States or Great Britain or France.
Yeah, it’s just absurd. China went straight from an empire to a civil war to an invasion on top of a civil war. And once that was over, a resumption of the civil war.
And during that entire time, Chiang Kai-shek built democratic institutions that worked about as well as anyone could hope they would under those circumstances. But ultimately, the Democrats in the United States decided it just wasn’t good enough. And instead, they handed China over to one of the greatest mass murderers of all time.
It looks remarkably similar to what the Democrats did 15 years later under JFK when JFK ordered the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, which plunged that country into chaos. It looks very much like Jimmy Carter selling out the shah in Iran. And we are still living with the consequences of all of those abominable decisions.
What American Leaders Knew
Don Ma: OK, I want to ask you about the consequences a little bit later. But at the time, did American leadership know about the Chinese Communist Party as we do today?
Rod D. Martin: Well, they should have. And I think that many of them did. Certainly, Roosevelt understood. He understood that we needed to cooperate with Mao against the Japanese, but he didn’t trust Mao. And he took meaningful steps to shore up Chiang Kai-shek, including the deployment of the U.S. Army under “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the brilliant campaign to relieve China’s isolation — because the Japanese held the coast — with air freight “over the Hump,” the Himalayas.
They’d fly in from India. My old boss, Congressman John Paul Hammerschmidt, had so many awards from the Republic of China you couldn’t count them all. They just wallpapered his congressional office because he had been one of those pilots who flew supplies into Chungking (now Chongqing) over the Hump during the war. They flew in these unpressurized, dinky little planes over the highest mountains in the world. It was a lifeline that saved the country.
But then again, Truman wasn’t Roosevelt. And when Truman came in, all of these pro-Communist influences that honestly had spent much of World War II infiltrating the U.S. government — some of the same people who stole our atomic secrets and handed them to the Soviet Union.
And, you know, the Soviets developed the atomic bomb in 1949, seemingly out of the blue, but in reality they had infiltrated the Manhattan Project pretty much from the first. You had spies in this country. You had communist agents in leadership positions in this country. And they influenced Truman and Marshall in the wrong direction. The consequence just being horrific.
The Human and Global Cost of Communist Victory
Don Ma: OK, so what has been the cost of these actions, the cost of the communist victory had on the world and that we’re living with today?
Rod D. Martin: Well, of course, at its most basic, China is not free. There are 1.4 billion Chinese who live in slavery that shouldn’t. And it really doesn’t matter what your social status is. Just look at Zhang Yuxia, who just got purged from leadership of the Chinese military. This is a dictatorship. It is absolutely brutal. And everything is absolutely by fiat of the dictator, Xi Jinping.
Then there’s the genocide. There’s the 65 million Chinese dead over the next 25 years after Mao’s victory in the Civil War. The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the destruction of Chinese historical artifacts, the destruction of Chinese literary artifacts, the destruction of the elderly. I mean, just the horrible campaign against anybody who represented or had any tie to Chinese culture and literature and history. The past had to be wiped away to advance the revolution.
Then you get the wars in Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia and Korea. Then you get, you know, the continuing genocide. It’s not like it stopped when Mao died in 76. The Chinese are conducting genocide against the Uyghurs right now in Xinjiang. The Chinese are persecuting Christians and Falun Gong practitioners, no different than they would have under Mao.
It’s a horrifying situation, glossed over, made-for-TV, partly because the CCP directly or indirectly controls a lot of Western media, certainly a lot of Hollywood studios. And so we get this kind of glossy picture of China that just isn’t true. And it has been far worse in the past than it is right now. But it’s still terrible.
And it really is by bad policy on the part of the United States, not more than anything else, but crucially, importantly, had we not made bad decisions in 1946, ‘47, ‘48, ‘49, the world would be infinitely better today. Not least in that the miracle you see in Taiwan, the just stunning economic achievements and liberty on that island, would be true for all of China. And that would just be transformative for the whole world.
Trade Enriched the Regime Without Bringing Freedom
Don Ma: And just one last question here. You talk about America’s policy mistakes when it comes to China, and you mentioned human rights abuses against Uyghurs, against Christians, against Falun Gong practitioners. Do you think one of those policies that facilitated, that allowed China to be able to have the resources to conduct these widespread human rights atrocities within China — let’s not forget live organ harvesting — do you think one of those mistakes was letting China into the World Trade Organization?
Rod D. Martin: Unquestionably, one of the dumbest things we ever did. I mean, the mistake in 1949 became apparent pretty fast. Truman realized the error and, of course, had no choice but to realize it once the Chinese invaded Korea. So we pretty quickly pivoted and got much more supportive of the Republic of China on Taiwan and did a lot of things right.
And even later, when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger pivoted to Beijing, the idea was, here’s this vast, impoverished country that has this incredibly long border with the Soviet Union. China isn’t going to threaten us meaningfully in the short term. The Russians could annihilate us. Let’s get together and prevent that. It wasn’t a lot different from Roosevelt’s decision to side with Stalin against Hitler: combine against the bigger threat.
But in the 1990s, all of this changed, as China moved from a pure communist state into a more fascist system that gives the appearance of private ownership, even though the reality is still government control.
As that began to work for them, Bill Clinton, making monstrous, monstrous mistakes, gave the communist regime Most Favored Nation status, allowed their entry into the World Trade Organization, and just had this Pollyanna view that somehow these things would liberalize China, that the communists would “evolve” into a free country. My gosh, it sounds just like Truman and Marshall in the 40s. And it worked out every bit as well.
We have had no liberalization in China. We have had Chinese dumping into Europe and the United States to destroy our industries, using the profits to build a giant military that actually is a threat to the world for the first time in China’s history.
So, yes, you’re exactly right. The WTO admission is one of the boondoggles of modern times. And in enabling the rise of China, we have enabled a geopolitical threat to the liberty and security of the whole world. It was all needless from the beginning.
Containment and a Path to Chinese Liberty
Don Ma: Okay, let me just ask you one final thing. Since we’re here already, maybe you can talk to us as well. What do you think, if letting China into the World Trade Organization didn’t work to liberalize its political system, what do you think would change the communist system within China to a more democratic system? What would cause that?
Rod D. Martin: I think that China suffers from the same problems that the Soviet Union did, just at a somewhat different scale. The Soviets remained a true centrally planned economy in which the government owned the means of production all the way to the end. And eventually, the internal contradictions of that system just disintegrated the whole thing. The system broke the country in pieces.
China pivoted brilliantly under Deng Xiaoping, beginning in 1979, to the fascist system we see now. We don’t normally call it that, but that is technically what it is. The government controls all the businesses, but it leaves the illusion of private ownership, private shareholding, the opportunity to actually become wealthy. And it’s actually a much more effective system than full collectivization.
It’s why Hitler was nearly able to conquer everybody in sight: people had the illusion of something left to lose. So they were actually more obedient, and they did become richer. The government confiscates their money whenever it feels like it, just like before; but all that means is that people don’t want to buck the system, and the Chinese military gets richer and richer and better armed and more threatening over time.
So because of that, the Chinese have been in a position — the mainland Chinese, the Red Chinese as we used to call them — have found themselves in a position to become vastly more powerful than they possibly could have with that same command and control economy you had in Russia.
But it still doesn’t work. And you see that in things like the ghost cities, where the Chinese government turned the construction industry loose to build entire empty cities, and in existing cities, entire empty neighborhoods.
Okay, but you’ve already got a real estate crisis. You’re pumping up your short-term numbers, as central planners always do, to attract foreign direct investment and to give the appearance that everything’s okay. But at the end of the day, the bill comes due.
Chinese people mostly have their investments in commercial and residential real estate. Those chickens have been coming home to roost for several years now, not just because Beijing overbuilt, but also due to the One Child Policy. The country is on the brink of a mass depopulation. And every additional variable in that equation results in lower real estate prices and a shrinking economy. China is in real trouble.
So I believe — it might take a while, it’s not going to be next year: it might be five, it might be 50, but in some amount of time — if we can just keep China at peace such that it can’t attack its enemies — so peace through strength — if you contain it, as we succeeded in containing the Soviet Union, those internal contradictions break it apart. Not necessarily break the country apart, but break down the regime. And you have an opening for the people to take back their liberty.
I believe that will happen. I pray for that to happen. I work every day toward that end.
Don Ma: Okay, Rod, very good analysis, if I do say so myself. Appreciate you sharing that. Thank you for your time today.
Rod D. Martin: Thank you.
