Li Schoolland is a longtime member of Liberty International, she was the primary organizer for our Liberty International Conferences twice in China, Slovakia, and Bali, Indonesia. She collaborated with and has spoken at most of our conferences and camps in Morocco, Georgia, Lithuania, Puerto Rico, Ukraine, Mongolia, and a dozen other countries for the past 30 years. For 10 years she single-handedly organized years of week-long seminars for a dozen Austrian economics scholars and 120 international students in collaboration with LI in Shenyang and across China. Likewise, she did much the same for 5 years in Mongolia.

In this week’s Liberty Podcast, Matt Kibbe talks with Li Schoolland, about her experience of growing up in China under Mao Zedong, the many ways that Chinese communism persecutes individuals and crushes opportunity. As elites in the U.S. increasingly look to China for ideas about economic and social governance, we have to remember that country’s abysmal record of human rights violations and grinding poverty. Not only does communism emphatically not work, but the government knows it doesn’t work, yet clings to it anyway because political power is more important than an improved life for the Chinese people. It’s a road that the U.S. must shun at every opportunity.