The Danger of Appeasing the CCP: Lessons Learned from the Story of the Zhongshan Wolf

(Minghui.org) I recently read the news that 15 member states of the United Nations issued a “Joint Statement on the Human Rights Situation in China” on November 21, 2025, to condemn the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) human rights abuses.

The statement read, in part: “We, the undersigned, are committed to promoting and protecting human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedoms of expression, peaceful assembly, association, and religion or belief, both at home and abroad, and we share ongoing deep concerns about serious violations occurring in China.

“Ethnic and religious minority groups—particularly Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, Christians, Tibetans, Falun Gong practitioners, and others—have faced targeted repression, including through separation of children from families in boarding schools, torture, and the destruction of cultural heritage.”

Two similar joint statements were issued in 2022, one by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in June and another by the UN General Assembly Third Committee in October. They were both limited to the human rights violations in Xinjiang. I am glad to hear the recent joint statement issued three years later covers Christians, Tibetans, and Falun Gong practitioners.

An Unprecedented Crime

When the CCP began its campaign against Falun Gong in 1999, there were about 100 million practitioners in China, making them the largest group persecuted by the CCP. Over the past 26 years, untold numbers of practitioners have been discriminated against, harassed, arrested, detained, and tortured. Many were taken to labor camps, were imprisoned, or became the victims of forced organ harvesting. The persecution is severe and unprecedented.

Compared to the CCP’s other human rights violations, the suppression of Falun Gong is especially abhorrent because it is a persecution of faith. Because of their belief in Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance, Falun Gong practitioners face the most extreme mistreatment in modern times: “Ruin their reputations, bankrupt them financially, eliminate them physically” was the order given by former CCP leader Jiang Zemin, who started the persecution in 1999.

“For China, religious freedom is an existential threat. For us, it’s a foundational principle. You can’t operate a free and open democracy without having religious freedom. We should stand up against what China is doing, and we should be doing it very clearly,” said former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Samuel Brownback during the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s annual China Forum held in Washington, D.C. on October 27 and 28, 2025.

The purpose of this forum is to help Americans understand the CCP and key issues in U.S.-China relations. “[Religious freedom] should move from being just a human rights issue to a national security issue. For us, religious freedom is the most potent, powerful tool that we have. It stands for our basic values. It stands as a complete threat to communist China,” said Ambassador Brownback.

Falun Gong suffers the most severe persecution by the CCP, Ambassador Brownback pointed out. “The most organized domestic group inside of China that could stand up to the regime are people of faith, and they have been persecuted for decades. They have been slaughtered and killed for decades. The Chinese Communist Party has killed more of its own people than any other regime in the history of mankind, and nobody else is even close. They have done this, and they’ve got three genocides going on now,” he said.

He believes the U.S. government should do more on this issue. “I think we should stand up for Falun Gong and the founder, Li Hongzhi, who lives in the United States now. I think people in the White House should meet with him and declare that they should have religious freedom,” said Brownback.

An Era Without Communism

In his speech, Ambassador Brownback also said the CCP deceives the Chinese people by calling religious groups “foreign.” “The real carpetbagger in China is communism—that’s what was developed in the European industrial age and goes over to China. It’s the one that doesn’t fit. If you want to get authentic China, do what the Falun Gong want—they just want to take it back to a cultural civilization that China was for thousands of years. If you want to get rid of carpetbaggers, do that,” he said.

This reminds me of a Chinese fable–The Wolf of Zhongshan. There are various versions of the story, but the theme is the same. After a wolf was injured by a hunter, it fled and met a scholar named Mr. Dongguo. Taking pity on the creature, Dongguo hid the wolf in one of his book bags and then lied to the hunters who were looking for the wolf.

After the hunters left and Dongguo released the wolf, however, the hungry wolf turned on him and was going to eat him. When Dongguo protested, the wolf said, “Since you’ve saved me once, why not do it again?”

As they continued arguing, the two met an old farmer. The farmer doubted the wolf could fit in the bag. To prove their own points, Dongguo and the wolf repeated what they did earlier. Once the wolf was in the bag, the farmer tied it up and convinced Dongguo to work together to put the wolf to death.

This story is similar to Aesop’s fable about the Farmer and the Snake. After saving a frozen snake by warming it with his body, the poor farmer found himself being bitten as the creature began to revive. Before he died, the farmer said, “Learn from my fate and do not take pity on a scoundrel.”

Aesop and Confucius lived about 2,500 years ago. Across cultures, there is shared wisdom: A kind person who is muddleheaded can be manipulated into abetting evil.

As Ambassador Brownback pointed out, communism is not an inherent part of Chinese culture. China, rather, adopted it and has had to learn how harmful it is the hard way. After all, humanity is based on kindness and respect, not communism’s ideology of class struggle, hatred, and lies. China would be better off without communism, and the same is true of our free society. It’s time to bag the scoundrel before it’s too late.