A Scholar Escaped China Two Decades Ago. Now He’s Warning About Beijing’s Infiltration in America.
Zhang Tianliang, senior fellow at the Consilium Institute and professor at Fei Tian College, in Cuddebackville, N.Y., on May 10, 2026. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times
First published on The Epoch Times on May 17, 2026
All Zhang Tianliang’s faith in the Communist Party crumbled right there, in a large state auditorium in Beijing.
They had all been waiting there, hundreds of them, shut inside since that sweltering morning in July 1999, bewildered.
It was the start of a bloody persecution, the likes of which hadn’t been since the Cultural Revolution, although no one knew at the time. “Wait until 3 p.m. You will see it on TV,” the officers told them.
At 3 p.m. sharp came the revelation: Falun Gong, the spiritual practice they and millions of others had taken up, had been banned by the Chinese leadership. As the crowd processed their shock, a state-run documentary began to play on the many television screens mounted to the ceiling, attacking the founder of Falun Gong, Mr. Li Hongzhi.
Of all the claims that set Zhang reeling, one was enough to undo his Party loyalty in one fell swoop: a short clip from a talk Li had given months prior that Zhang had watched in full. The snippet cut out a phrase midsentence, reversing Li’s meaning.
If the regime could alter a speech to fabricate incriminating evidence, what else was it capable of?
It hit Zhang that the Party might have been lying to him his whole life.
A year later, in 2000, Zhang escaped China for the United States. Twenty-six years later, he’s a Chinese history professor, political commentator, and coauthor of several books on communism that have been translated into more than 20 languages. A talk show he appeared on, “Discussions on Chinese Communist Party Culture,” circulated around China via video copies and broadcast, and reached tens of millions of people by his estimates.
His most recent endeavor is the English-language documentary “China’s Stealth Invasion,” which lays out all the infiltration tactics in Beijing’s tool chest. The film is described as “a high-stakes investigative documentary examining how the Chinese Communist Party may be exploiting America’s openness, institutions, and dependencies to expand influence from within.”
Zhang said that America took him in when he was at his most vulnerable, and now that the freedoms of his second home are at stake, he sees an obligation to speak out.
“The Chinese Communist Party considers America as its biggest enemy,” he told The Epoch Times. “I can’t just watch it manipulate this country and erode its way of life.”
Read the full article at The Epoch Times.
