Liberty does not die in a coup; it dies when the courts, press, and civic groups that once protected it are rewritten into instruments of “national security.”

By Sasha Gong, published by American Greatness / Center for American Greatness

Can communism come to America? Until recently, most Americans would have dismissed the question as alarmist, even absurd.

In Brief

The example of Hong Kong proves how quickly a free society can rewrite itself when the institutions that stand between the citizen and unchecked power are hollowed out and its government run by people who must swear the Party is never to be challenged.

Journalist Sasha Gong traces the steps that sank a city once ranked among the freest on earth, to one gutted within a generation after it was promised fifty years of autonomy following the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China in 1997. 

Gong’s warning from Hong Kong is aimed at America. Two and a half centuries of elections, private property, free speech, and independent courts have convinced many Americans that dictatorship cannot happen to their country. Democratic Socialism exploits that complacency, cautions Gong. It offers the same bargain every socialist and communist project has offered: let the state take a larger share of economic life, and inequality will vanish. What that bargain actually buys is control. Once government seizes, rations, and redirects wealth, it will also silence the people who resist. Opposition becomes sabotage, criticism becomes disinformation, and the institutions built to restrain power are turned into tools to protect it.

Democratic Socialism is not a kinder path to fairness, contends Gong. It is the opening argument by which a free country talks itself into chains.

Read this commentary by Sasha Gong in full at the publisher’s website here.

Sasha Gong is a Probe International contributor, prominent journalist, author, and Harvard-educated sociologist who previously served as the Chief of the Voice of America’s Mandarin Service. In 1974, while still in China, Sasha Gong joined an underground pro-democracy group, was imprisoned for her writing, and spent a year in solitary confinement. She became an American citizen in 2001. In July 2025, Hong Kong authorities placed a HK$200,000 bounty on her head. Gong’s supposed crime was explaining the American constitutional system and criticizing Beijing on Cantonese programs from U.S. soil—and for that a foreign authoritarian regime claimed jurisdiction over her, which is Hong Kong’s final lesson: dictatorship does not always arrive with tanks in the streets.