It’s time to fundamentally rethink America’s approach to the Chinese Communist Party, argues Sam Brownback, former U.S. senator, Kansas governor, U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, and author of the new book “China’s War on Faith.”

Ahead of President Donald Trump’s high-stakes summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing, I’m sitting down with Brownback to understand what’s really at stake and why he believes America is wasting the greatest leverage it has had.

“I think we’ve just got to recognize: ... This is an evil regime. They’ve killed more of their own people than any other regime in the history of mankind, and we’ve been treating them like a normal country,” Brownback says.

Brownback lays out the case that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is currently conducting three genocides—against the Uyghur Muslims, Falun Gong practitioners, and Tibetan Buddhists—through mass detention, torture, cultural eradication, and forced organ harvesting. At the same time, the regime is escalating its war on Christianity, arresting pastors, and crushing underground churches, Brownback says.

Now, the CCP is also exporting the technologies it uses to surveil and persecute dissidents to at least 80 other countries, he says.

For decades, human rights and religious freedom has been a “red line” for the Chinese regime that American leaders and diplomats have tiptoed around.

But the reality is that human rights and religious freedom are the CCP’s deepest vulnerability and insecurity—and America’s most potent weapon and leverage against this regime, Brownback argues.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.