In 2024 Lily Tang Williams gained national fame as the Republican nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives in New Hampshire’s Second Congressional District.

She fell short in that race but is now using her platform to warn Americans of the perils of communism and against allowing the Chinese government to increase its leverage in international affairs through business ties.

Williams knows much about those two issues because she was born and raised in communist China before escaping to the United States as a young adult.

“Because I was born there and I lived there for 24 years, I feel like I have a mission to educate people about what happened to us,” Williams said.

Williams spoke in Oklahoma City on Jan. 11 at an event hosted by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, Moms for Liberty of Tulsa County, and state Rep. Gabe Woolley, R-Broken Arrow,

Williams’ concerns are twofold. She worries that too many Americans don’t understand the problems created by U.S. dependence on Chinese businesses, which are in effect an arm of the Chinese government, and she worries that too many Americans are willingly embracing the worst aspects of communist regimes in daily life.

Williams’ life in China, from 1966 to 1976, coincided with the Chinese government’s “Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries,” which was designed to eradicate opponents of the Chinese Communist Party government.

The tactics used by the Chinese government are being echoed today in the United States, such as separating Chinese into “oppressor versus oppressed,” Williams noted.

In the United States, those categories often break along racial lines, but Chinese communists had to generate other distinctions that “divide and conquer” people, Williams recalled.

“We all look the same. Chinese people look the same, right?” Williams said. “There’s no white, black, Hispanics, but still that is a part of this. So that’s one feature of Communism you can recognize.”

She’s also seen echoes of the Chinese Communist Party in the tactics embraced by many “woke” activists in the United States.

“Some other features, like burn down statues, burn down buildings, controlled media, and (telling) the law enforcement to stand down, and turn family/neighbors against each other,” Williams said. “And the (Chinese) struggle sessions kind of remind you of DEI training sessions or Critical Race Theory. So all that similarity is there.”

DEI refers to “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” a set of practices often based in Marxist-derived Critical Race Theory.

At the same time, Williams is concerned that many Americans fail to understand how business ties with China companies are, in effect, business ties with the Chinese government and its communist leadership.

“China is (the) largest totalitarian country,” Williams said. “You might call them fascists—not communists anymore—fascist, but with Communist Party dictatorship. So you have a private company, private property, but you’ve got to comply; otherwise ‘we’re going to take over everything.’”

In China, she said, the government controls businesses, even those touted as “private” companies, noting the Chinese government can and has forced business leaders to retire or step aside if they don’t toe the party line.

“No matter how wealthy you are, when you don’t have political freedom, your wealth means nothing,” Williams said.

In China, she noted government officials “can confiscate” your property.

“They can freeze your assets at any time,” Williams said.

She urged Oklahoma policymakers to ban foreign ownership of state land, in part to thwart the ambitions of Chinese leaders.

Williams also noted that Chinese officials have sought to influence American policy through a wide range of initiatives, such as funding Confucius Institutes at colleges nationwide (including at the University of Oklahoma).

Those institutes were touted as a way to provide U.S. students with the opportunity to learn foreign languages and about other cultures but often served instead to advance Chinese Communist Party views on world affairs. The institutes pressured universities to adopt specific stances on a range of issues or keep silent on others, such as China’s human rights abuses.

And, Williams argues, Chinese entities often indirectly work to sow dissension in the U.S. by funding various groups.

“They also are involved in our country’s conflicts from CRT, DEI, BLM, Antifa, and the college campus anti-Israel protesters,” Williams said. “They’re involved, but you don’t know they’re involved, because you don’t know who is funding what.”

BLM refers to Black Lives Matter, an organization whose founders were famously self-proclaimed Marxists.

The trajectory of Williams’ life has taken her from the grinding poverty and oppression of Communist China to the freedom of the United States.

As a child living under communism, Williams recalled the “horrible, primitive, very, very bad conditions.” In theory, communism is supposed to provide for all core needs of families. In practice, Williams noted, the opposite is true. Families go without core needs and there is a high price paid for what little they can obtain.

“Nothing’s free,” Williams said. “We actually had to pay for everything.”

When Williams attended law school in China, her professors told her: “The law is not for justice and for the citizen. A law is just a tool to govern the people.”

But at one event, she met an American student visiting China who discussed the U.S. Declaration of Independence’s statement that individual rights and liberty come from God, not from the government.

“My light bulb came on,” Williams said, “and it never turned off.”

She eventually managed to leave China to study in the United States in 1988. During her first years in the U.S., Williams read Free to Choose by  Milton Friedman, which discusses how freedom is a key component of economic growth. She called the book “eye-opening.”

“I learned free-market capitalism,” Williams said. “Because I thought all the time (there was) a government solution to everything.”

Through the years, Williams became more active in civic affairs, ranging from serving on her homeowners’ association to shifting her children out of the traditional public school into a public charter school where she also served on the school board as chairwoman.

Along the way, she saw how citizens in the U.S. hold those in government positions accountable, rather than having the government control the citizens.

“I fired the principal,” Williams recalled. “I felt so empowered. Empowered. Yes! I have parental rights in this country.”

Williams warned Oklahomans that too many youth do not know the lessons she has learned.

“I was told, literally, by lots of young people, I have no credibility to speak on communism because I did not survive ‘real communism,’” Williams said. “I was starved. I was oppressed. I saw what happened with my own eyes. And 100 million people died during a hundred years of communism. Our kids don’t know that. So education is a key.”

House Bill 1094, by Woolley, would require Oklahoma public schools to teach students in grades six through 12 about the “atrocities of communism,” including the “human cost of communism, including the systematic slaughter, imprisonment, and oppression of individuals, as well as the loss of basic freedoms and human rights.”

He hopes the bill will ensure Williams’ fears are not realized in Oklahoma.

“We really need to, I think, make sure we’re not skipping over these parts of history,” said Woolley, a former teacher. “We can learn from history.”