Exclusive – China Expert Steven Mosher: Xi Jinping a 'Son of Mao's Spirit'

The bloodiest man in the history of “the most deadly idea ever conceived in the history of the world,” communist mass murderer Mao Zedong, “embraced evil in all respects” – and successor Xi Jinping is faithfully following in his footsteps, acclaimed scholar Steven W. Mosher affirms in his new book, The Devil and Communist China: From Mao Down to Xi.

Mosher, the president of the Population Research Institute and one of America’s foremost social scientists focused on communist China, explores the spiritual depths of Maoism in his latest work. The Devil and Communist China addresses not just the prodigious trail of death that Mao left behind – the “Great Leap Forward” alone is estimated to have killed 45 million people – but the anti-religion driving him. The book is in many ways a sequel to his 2017 book, Bully of Asia, which focused its attention on the lesser-discussed totalitarian ideology of ancient China, legalism, and how first emperor Qin Shi Huang’s desire for complete control over the life of every single subject inspired Mao independent of the arrival of Marxism to China.

In his latest book, Mosher explores how Mao came to communism and how he married legalism to Marxism, but it goes beyond a political history to explore how demonic spiritual beliefs, animism, and paganism influenced Mao’s hatred of Christianity and his dismemberment of Buddhism, Confucianism, and other local belief systems. Mosher explained to Breitbart News this week why he believes this theological approach to understanding Chinese communism, far from a dry historical account of events, is necessary today as Xi Jinping consolidates his stranglehold over the country using the same blueprint.

“Looking at him [Mao] through the lens of the natural law – which is written on every human heart – it was clear not just from his deeds but from his words that he had as a young man lustily embraced evil in all respects,” Mosher told Breitbart News. “He rose to power by betraying all of those closest to him and ultimately the Chinese people themselves.”

Mosher shares in his book a remarkable anecdote from Mao’s early childhood in which his mother bowed to a stone spirit in reverence.

“When he was three, Mao’s mother consecrated him to a spirit that was thought to inhabit a stone monolith outside of their village,” Mosher told Breitbart News. “She made him kowtow before the monolith and renamed him ‘Third Son of the Stone.’ He took great pride in that name, often referring to himself by using it.”

“Is it a mere coincidence that he grew up into a man who, as far as his feelings for his fellow Man were concerned, had a heart of stone?” he asked.

Mao is the quintessential “model” for what a tyrant should be in China, Mosher explained, which is why his shadow looms so large over global politics decades after his death.

“No one has channelled Mao more successfully than the current leader of China, Xi Jinping. Xi may not be the son of Mao’s flesh, but he is the son of Mao’s spirit, a loathsome master of subterfuge and machination,” he told Breitbart News.

Xi began emulating Mao almost immediately, announcing a “mass line” purge of “corrupt” rivals within the Communist Party a year into his position at the helm of the country and enacting genocides against non-Han ethnic groups, most prominently the Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz people of occupied East Turkistan. Xi has also taken actions apparently intended to erase Mao, however, including inserting himself in the Chinese Constitution to supplant Mao and successor Deng Xiaoping; replacing Maoism with “Xi Jinping Thought” in critical communist documents; using state propaganda to declare himself equal or superior to Mao; and violently persecuting ardent Maoists who openly protested against Xi’s coddling of his wealthy elite friends.

“It is precisely because Xi is emulating Mao that he is doing his best to replace him as the great savior of the Chinese people in the minds of the Chinese people,” Mosher explained to Breitbart News. “Mao, by the end of his life, had eliminated nearly all of the other senior leaders of the Chinese Communist Power in one way or another.”

“He unleashed the Red Guards on intra-party critics like Liu Shaoqi and General Peng Dehuai, who tortured them to death. He condemned even his most faithful acolyte, Premier Zhou Enlai, to die a painful death from bladder cancer by denying him medical treatment,” Mosher recalled.

“So, too, does Xi Jinping now stand alone at the pinnacle of power, having removed or sidelined all of the other senior leaders and purged their factions from ranks of the party,” he continued. “Recent pronouncements have omitted references to Marx, Lenin, and even Mao leaving Xi’s thought as the sole guiding principle of the Party. Xi’s cult brooks no competition, even from beyond the grave.”

Mosher asserts that understanding Mao’s political and spiritual legacy and its impact on Xi are pivotal because “people need to understand that we are already at war with the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] across all domains except the kinetic – and that China is winning.” Mosher continued: “China is at war with us in cyberspace, relentlessly launching attacks on computer networks, both public and private. China is at war with us using genetically engineered weapons,” he said, adding, “In releasing COVID upon the world, the CCP carried out a bioweapons attack on America. China is waging an ongoing kind of chemical warfare against us using fentanyl, profiting from the killing of 100,000 young Americans each year. It is waging fifth generation warfare against the minds of our youth, using social media platforms like TikTok.”

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He concluded with the warning that “communism cannot be contained; it can only be defeated.”
“We are not, at the moment, firing bullets at each other. But Beijing is constantly threatening to go kinetic not only against Taiwan, but against U.S. allies such as Japan and the Philippines,” Mosher said. “China regards this as a ‘you die, I live’ struggle, which is to say a fight to the death. America would be well advised to view it in the same light.”

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