American Thought Leaders

To understand the significance of the sweeping military purges in China and how Beijing is reacting to America’s war with Iran, I’m sitting down with eminent China scholar Robert Suettinger, a former CIA and State Department intelligence analyst, a senior advisor at The Stimson Center, and author of “The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer.”
“There’s no question of the fact that Xi Jinping is now less of a dominant leader than he was six or eight months ago,” Suettinger says.
Earlier this year, Xi purged two top generals from the CCP’s military brass, on the heels of earlier purges last year. Now, only two of the originally seven members of the Central Military Commission remain. One of them is Xi himself; the other one, General Zhang Shengmin, is a political commander and has, like Xi, no combat experience.
After the January purges, Xi issued an order to the military demanding that everyone acknowledge him as the head of the military commission. “The silence from all those military commands has been deafening and has been noticed by everybody,” Suettinger says.
In the Chinese Communist Party itself, Xi is also facing trouble.
The CCP is not a monolithic party, he told me, but a complex entity with many competing factions: “There’s a Shanghai group, there’s a Shandong group, there’s a Shaanxi group, and they all don’t like each other,” Suettinger says.
Suettinger believes that Xi’s many purges have unified opposition against him not only in the military but also within the Communist Party. “Xi is hated by almost everybody in China,” he said.
Another reason the cracks in the system, as he put it, are beginning to be more evident, is that the Chinese economy hasn’t been doing well in many years: “The Chinese people are very unhappy that their wealth opportunities are disappearing. Graduates coming out of colleges are not able to find good jobs. People who have good jobs are losing them. People who are operating in the gig economy are losing their jobs. The farmers don’t have anything to do when they go back home.”
People outside of China don’t usually know how poor vast numbers of Chinese citizens still are, Suettinger told me. China’s Premier Li Keqiang himself stated in May 2020 during a press conference that 600 million people live below the poverty line and don’t even earn enough to rent a room in mid-sized Chinese cities.
Where is China’s totalitarian system headed? The system, Suettinger argued, is way more fragile than it looks. “It is brittle, and when it breaks, it tends to break hard, and it tends to melt in ways that are not predictable,” he said.
Notably, the CCP has not come out to meaningfully support its longtime ally, Iran. The CCP has long utilized Iran to distract America and keep its focus on the Middle East, Suettinger says, but now, to Beijing’s chagrin, America is effectively neutralizing this longtime CCP proxy.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb is not your typical astronomer. For many years, he’s been scouring the universe for the abnormal and the unknown. “Brushing anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking,” as he puts it, is anathema for him.
“One way to learn more,” he told me, “is to pay attention to the anomalies, because they may lead us to something that we’ve never thought about … Maybe they will open up our eyes to extra dimensions … or new physics.”
In 2021, Loeb founded the Harvard-based Galileo Project to speed up the scientific search for evidence of extraterrestrial objects. Since then, Loeb has been supervising the construction of three state-of-the-art observatories in the United States: one in Massachusetts, one in Pennsylvania and one in Nevada. They make use of machine learning models to identify unexplained anomalies and use triangulation to infer the distance of objects from Earth.
“Instead of waiting for the U.S. government to release its data, we just look up and ask, are there any objects up there that are not human-made? And of course, anything that is human-made is boring, as far as I’m concerned,” he said.
Did his observatories find evidence of objects that might be extraterrestrial? Perhaps. They detected objects that, as he said, “arrive in our backyard from outside the solar system.” Such interstellar objects were purely theoretical before 2017, when the first one was discovered. Since then, two more have been found. This, he told me, is the new frontier in astronomy.
But are these interstellar objects of natural origin? Many astronomers believe they are, but Loeb is not so sure. Take, for example, Oumuamua, the first recognized interstellar object ever discovered: Its core features are undisputedly abnormal. Oumuamua moved very quickly without a recognizable method of propulsion. And as it left the solar system, it accelerated to a degree that could not be explained by gravity alone.
Loeb has been arguing that Oumuamua might be an artificial light sail propelled by solar radiation pressure and built by ancient civilizations that exist or existed beyond our solar system.
“Most of the stars formed billions of years before the sun. The sun formed only 4.6 billion years ago … There was plenty of time for Voyager-like probes to arrive in the solar system. And so we are searching for any technological artifacts, objects very different from traditional SETI,” he said.
SETI stands for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” and refers to a project dedicated to detecting advanced extraterrestrial civilizations.
Here are some of the many other topics we discussed in our wide-ranging interview:
-What is the origin of hypervelocity stars that race through the universe at a significant fraction of the speed of light? -Are there other dimensions beyond our own? -How would the discovery of extraterrestrial life impact religious views? -Is AI a form of alien intelligence?
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Pastor Bob Fu was a student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement and later led an underground Chinese house church. In 1996, he was imprisoned for “illegal evangelism.”
He later fled China and came to the United States, where he founded ChinaAid, a Christian human‑rights organization that documents cases of persecution, provides legal aid, and advocates for religious freedom in China.
In this episode, we dive into the escalation of religious persecution in recent years in China, including the growing dehumanization of Christians.
Echoing Mao Zedong’s targeting of “five black classes” during the Cultural Revolution, in 2012, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders labelled Christian underground churches as one of five new “black classes” or black categories.
Fu says that the CCP’s leadership is determined to destroy the positive image that Chinese people have of Christian believers.
“Xi Jinping wants to play God,” Fu says. “The Communist Party treats these people as a threat to the regime’s existence. The goal is to eradicate Christian faith from the map of China.”
We also discuss a case now at the Supreme Court, Cisco v. Doe, which could have important repercussions for American companies that enable China’s human rights atrocities.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“The U.S. went to war in Iran because Iran made itself a Chinese weapon,” argues policy analyst Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East.
Riboua is the founder of the “China in MENA Project,” which tracks communist Chinese expansion and influence across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
Is there a bigger dimension to the Iran war that people are missing?
“We have this tendency to just look at the countries involved ... but there’s a big player, and the big player here is China,” she says. “China has been investing immensely in the region in the last two decades, in courting, in coordinating, in cooperating with Gulf countries, with Iran itself, and also with its proxies.”
And why, I ask her, has China been so keen on gaining strategic influence over the Middle East?
It’s because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) understands that “China cannot rise without having the United States weakened in one of the most important regions in the world,” she said.
“Iran has been that tool. China has built Iran’s military arsenal. It has collaborated extensively with Iran’s proxies, especially the Houthis.
“And reversing that calculus is what Operation Epic Fury is doing.”
In our interview, we delve deep into the symbiotic relationship between the two countries—why China needs Iran and why Iran needs China:
Which role does Iran play on China’s geopolitical chessboard?
Why did China turn Iran into one of its strategic allies, and how did the Islamic Republic benefit?
How dependent is the Iranian regime on China’s military support and surveillance infrastructure?
How dependent is China on Iran’s oil?

The goal of America’s military operation, Riboua believes, is to dismantle the whole structure of the Islamic Republic. “The United States is destroying ... every single launcher, every single missile facility. Their whole Navy has been absolutely crushed. ... It’s 2,000 targets so far, and they’re hitting even more.”
We also discuss what the Chinese regime will do if the Islamic Republic disappears.
How will its geopolitical strategy be impacted? What will happen to the CCP’s Belt and Road initiative, in which Iran played a central role? And how will China’s economy and its relationships with its Middle Eastern and North African proxies be affected?
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Dozens of Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have been killed in U.S.–Israeli joint strikes on Iran.
In this episode, I’m sitting down again with seasoned China analyst Gordon Chang, author of “Plan Red,” to understand how this is changing the global geopolitical landscape—especially for Beijing.
Including the Venezuela raid that captured regime leader Nicolás Maduro, this is the second time President Donald Trump appears to be neutralizing a key ally of Beijing.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessari