Xi Jinping’s latest visit to Pyongyang has set off a wave of online commentary about China “North Koreanizing.” I have never found that framing convincing. North Korea resembles one of China’s smaller county towns: evil in character, but small in scale, limited in reach, and almost perfectly sealed off from the world. In its essential nature, the CCP regime is a supercharged, upgraded North Korea, magnified tens of thousands of times over, its methods far more concealed, its damage far deeper and more severe.
How the CCP embedded itself in the global economy
North Korea’s totalitarian rule depends on poverty, isolation, and nuclear blackmail directed at the international community. The regime functions like a street thug crouched in a corner, manufacturing periodic crises to extort food and fuel. Its harm to the world is external, localized, and, in principle, physically containable.
The CCP’s path has been altogether different: high-level parasitism followed by ferocious counterattack. Exploiting decades of Western appeasement, the Party embedded itself at the very core of global supply chains. Western technology giants and European automotive pillars have surrendered their supply chains and market access to Beijing’s grip. Wielding trillions in capital through the Belt and Road Initiative, the CCP has spread debt traps and authoritarian governance models across Africa, Latin America, and deep into Europe.
How the CCP hunts dissidents and controls opinion across borders
North Korea builds high walls to survive. It bans its citizens from accessing outside information. Its control is, by nature, defensive. The CCP, as the aggregate of tens of thousands of North Koreas, operates on an entirely different scale: beyond the Great Firewall and its own extreme internal controls, the Party has built an apparatus of offensive, cross-border suppression active on five continents.
Inside China, the CCP has constructed what amounts to a digitized high-tech concentration camp: big data, facial recognition, and platform algorithms woven into a system of total surveillance. Outside China, it extends the reach of information censorship and cognitive warfare directly into Western public opinion and onto the smartphones of young people, through tools like TikTok and WeChat. North Korea can, at most, intercept defectors at the border. The CCP’s secret overseas police stations, United Front organizations, and so-called “overseas 110” hotlines are already active on the streets of New York, London, and Toronto. The Party further weaponizes its vast, non-liberalized domestic market as bait, successfully inducing Wall Street elites and senior Western politicians to self-censor.
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How China has mass-produced a population conditioned for obedience
North Korea’s totalitarianism is tightly sealed and carries a certain crude, tribal roughness. The CCP, as the luxury upgrade, has carried out the most brutal spiritual formatting operation in human history, applied to 1.4 billion people.
Through decades of indoctrination in schools, the information firewall, and an extreme process of communist consolidation in which stability overrides everything and security overrides development, the CCP has mass-produced hundreds of millions of what might be called “spiritual North Koreans.” When a regime governing 1.4 billion people, controlling a massive nuclear arsenal and a modern military, operates with the same frictionless decision-making as Pyongyang, the same cold efficiency in mass mobilization, but at tens of millions of times the scale, its capacity to destroy world peace is catastrophic.
North Korea is a vicious dog locked in a cage, extorting its keepers through barking. China, having grown through the wave of global democratization and swept outward through globalization, is a many-sided, many-bodied, constantly mutating beast that is consuming the whole of human civilization.
Xi Jinping’s ‘community of shared human destiny’ as a cover for global domination
This supercharged North Korea’s grandiosity is most visible in the pathological ambition Xi Jinping displays, an ambition that dwarfs even Kim Jong-un’s. The “Community of Shared Human Destiny,” the signature foreign-policy slogan Xi promoted loudly not long after taking power, is a political manifesto for exporting communist tyranny worldwide.
Xi Jinping is redefining the international order, seeking to dissolve and replace the universal values of freedom, democracy, human rights, and constitutionalism with the deliberately vague concept of “tianxia datong,” a classical Chinese notion of universal harmony under a single authority, repurposed here as a rhetorical weapon. Xi is simultaneously accelerating a process of institutional colonization: through United Front operations, financial infiltration, and technological integration, the Party is making it progressively harder for more and more countries to disentangle themselves from Beijing economically or politically. Increasingly, international organizations, particularly the United Nations and its affiliated bodies, are being positioned to lend the machinery of global governance to the defense of tyranny.
Pyongyang’s cult of personality aspires only to keep its subjects bowing within sealed borders. Beijing’s ambition is to make all of global civilization yield to a single, supreme ideological authority.
The mass genuflection on the streets of Pyongyang during Xi’s visit was two dictators warming each other’s hands for their own separate purposes. Through United Front operations, money, technology, industrial supply chains, and a communist diaspora spreading across the globe, the CCP has taken the whole of humanity hostage.
