I seek to empower people by giving them something to ponder.
By Marcial Bonifacio
6-11-2026
My American friends and countrymen, consider what our nation might look like today had a Chinese fleet, rather than a Spanish-commissioned Genoese navigator, first established a colonial presence on American shores in the fifteenth century. This is not merely an idle historical curiosity. It is a precise instrument for measuring the value of what you possess and what you stand to lose if you cease to understand how it came to exist.
The voyages of Admiral Zheng He between 1405 and 1433 demonstrated that China possessed, at that moment, the most formidable naval capability in the world. His treasure ships, by most scholarly estimates, dwarfed anything sailing under European flags. However, the Ming Dynasty ultimately abandoned those voyages, turned inward, and left the Americas to be reached by others. This is due to Confucian court officials, who viewed foreign engagement as wasteful and destabilizing, successfully arguing that China was a self-sufficient civilization. Emperor Zhu Di, whose expansionist ambitions had already extended Chinese imperial reach across Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, and the East African coast, provided Zheng He both the mandate and the means to project power further still. Under so aggressive an imperial commission, and commanding the most formidable fleet in the world, Zheng He possessed the capability and the institutional authorization to extend that reach across the Pacific to American shores, had the political will in Peking survived him.
Had Zheng He established a lasting colonial presence in America rather than Christopher Columbus, the intellectual inheritance that produced our founding documents would never have arrived on these shores. After all, the Declaration of Independence was not conjured from thin air. It was the product of a specific and irreplaceable genealogy: Magna Carta of 1215, which first established that even a king was bound by law; the English Civil War, which demonstrated that a sovereign could be held accountable by his subjects; John Locke's natural rights philosophy, which articulated that life, liberty, and property are not privileges granted by government but endowments antecedent to it; Montesquieu's doctrine of separated powers; and one hundred and fifty years of colonial self-governance in which Americans developed both the habit and the expectation of ordered liberty. None of that intellectual inheritance exists in the Confucian administrative tradition. In Confucian political philosophy, the individual does not possess rights which the state cannot touch. The state, properly ordered, is the guarantor of social harmony, not the threat against which the individual must be protected. From that premise, no Declaration of Independence can ever be constructed, because its self-evident truths are not self-evident within that framework. They are, in fact, incomprehensible within it. Political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996): "The Confucian heritage, with its emphasis on authority, order, hierarchy, and the supremacy of the collectivity over the individual, creates obstacles to democratization."
To understand precisely what American life would resemble under the governance that a Chinese colonial inheritance would have produced, one need not speculate beyond what is documented. Mao Tse-tung's seizure of power in 1949 and his subsequent administration of China produced, by credible historical estimates, between 45 and 55 million deaths during the Great Leap Forward alone (the largest man-made famine in recorded history, achieved not by natural catastrophe but by deliberate policy). Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, in Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), documented that Mao said privately to associates: "Deaths have benefits. They can fertilize the ground." This was recorded in the context of his indifference to mass casualties during the Great Leap Forward. His Cultural Revolution then systematically destroyed China's intellectual class, abolished private property, criminalized religious practice, and subjected the entire population to ideological surveillance administered through neighborhood denunciation sessions. Every American freedom you exercise without a second thought (to speak, to worship, to publish, to own property, to demand a fair trial) was precisely what those policies extinguished, in a nation of hundreds of millions of people who possessed no constitutional mechanism to resist them.
Xi Jinping's governance represents the mature and technologically sophisticated continuation of what Mao began. Consider the specific instruments currently applied to China's own population. The Social Credit System assigns behavioral compliance scores to citizens and restricts their movement, employment, and economic participation based on political obedience. An estimated seven hundred million surveillance cameras, equipped with facial recognition technology, monitor public and private behavior continuously. More than 1 million Uyghur Muslims have been interned in Xinjiang without trial, charge, or conviction under any recognizable standard of law. Hong Kong's common law protections, which had guaranteed its residents freedoms approximating those of the American Bill of Rights, were systematically dismantled after 2020. Xi Jinping himself abolished presidential term limits in 2018, making himself ruler for life. These are not mere hypothetical projections of what Chinese governance might become. Indeed, they are already its documented present condition, applied to 1.4 billion human beings who have no First Amendment, no Second Amendment, no Fourth Amendment, no Fifth Amendment, and no independent judiciary empowered to enforce any equivalent protection.
Apply those instruments to the American population and the implications become precise rather than abstract. The American who writes political commentary critical of his government would face not disagreement or social disapproval but the documented fate of those who have done so in China. Liu Xiaobo, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 for advocating constitutional democracy, died in Chinese government custody in 2017. Journalists like Chen Qiushi, who reported honestly on the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan in early 2020, disappeared, were silenced, or imprisoned.
The Chinese government's own official criminal conviction rate stands at approximately 99.9 percent, a figure that is not evidence of exceptional law enforcement competence but of a judiciary that exists to serve the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), rather than to adjudicate truth. An acquittal implies prosecutorial error, and prosecutorial error implies Party failure, and Party failure is the one verdict no Chinese court will render.
Without our Declaration of Independence, the self-evident truths that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, would have no legal standing and no philosophical foundation in civic life. Without our Constitution, freedom of speech and of the press would be replaced by what Xi Jinping's government formally designates as the correct guidance of public opinion, essentially meaning state media monopoly and criminal prosecution of unauthorized political expression. Freedom of religion would be replaced by the active subordination of all religious institutions to state authority, precisely as the CCP currently practices with Catholic bishops, Protestant house churches, Tibetan Buddhist leadership, and Muslim communities.
The right to keep and bear arms (which is the provision our founders most explicitly connected to the people's capacity to resist tyranny in protection of their property) would be entirely absent, as it is throughout the history of Chinese governance. Private property rights, which John Locke identified as the material foundation of all other liberties, would exist only at the pleasure of the state. In China today, all land is technically owned by the state, and private holdings may be seized by administrative order without judicial review.
The American who takes these liberties for granted has perhaps never asked himself why no equivalent of the First Amendment exists in Chinese law, why no equivalent of the Second Amendment has ever been proposed in Chinese governance, and why the Chinese Communist Party expends such extraordinary resources to prevent its own citizens from reading, writing, and speaking freely, and why no Chinese citizen may lawfully own a firearm with which to resist the government that owns everything he possesses. The answer is not that the Chinese people are incapable of valuing liberty. The answer is that a government which cannot survive honest scrutiny must suppress it, and a people which possesses no constitutional document enumerating their rights against the state, possesses no rights at all; they only possess privileges, which are revocable at the state’s will.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America (1835): "The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one." Our freedoms are not the natural condition of human civilization. They are the exception, which is precisely why the word exceptional applies. They required the right explorers arriving from the right civilization at the right intellectual moment, carrying with them a legal and philosophical tradition one thousand years in the making. They required founders who understood that tradition thoroughly enough to encode it in documents designed to outlast any single generation's virtue or vigilance, and they require a citizenry today that understands what it holds. It is not as a permanent birthright that needs no defense, but an inheritance so specific and so fragile that it can be lost by any generation that forgets the conditions of its creation. Benjamin Franklin, upon emerging from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, was reportedly asked by a citizen what form of government the delegates had produced. He replied: "A Republic, if you can keep it."
Therefore, my friends and countrymen, regardless of how you may personally feel about Columbus the man, Columbus the explorer played a crucial role in America as we know it today. Hence, his voyage was essential to the establishment of a government engineered to protect our individual liberty. It was his voyage that delivered the civilization whose thousand-year legal inheritance made possible our freedom of speech, our freedom of worship, our right to bear arms, and our right to hold property that no government may seize without due process of law, none of which a Chinese colonial inheritance could ever have produced.
Long live Liberty, and long live the Republic of the United States of America!
Stay informed!
Join a community of engaged patriots passionate about liberty, good governance, and strengthening U.S.-Philippine relations. By subscribing to Marcial's Law, you’ll receive exclusive insights and updates on policies that shape the future of both nations. Be part of the conversation that challenges the status quo and advocates for a return to constitutional principles. Subscribe now and never miss a critical update!
[…] I stated in my commentary Could America Be a Province of China Without Christopher Columbus?, had Ming China carried that same expansionist will across the Pacific and become the civilization […]