As nations across the world struggle to contain the Wuhan coronavirus, they should realize it is also long past time to quarantine the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The people of China must understand that their future under the Communist Party is as outcasts, lepers, pariahs – isolated and quarantined by the civilized world. If that is not the future they want, the time to rise up and overthrow the Communists is now.

The future of China is warehouses stuffed full of rotting and decaying goods no one will buy, accounts filled with money they can’t spend, travel instantly blocked at the first sign of pandemic because that’s the only responsible way for the world to handle the Communist Party.

The early days of the Wuhan outbreak provide a deadly and unforgettable lesson that the Communists cannot be trusted to do anything except protect their own political and financial interests. They love to turn the rhetoric of civilized nations against them, nattering on endlessly about global standards, international law, and “win-win cooperation,” but they believe in none of those things. The lives of their own citizens matter very little to the CCP, the lives of foreigners even less.

China kept international officials from visiting the hot zone, politically corrupted the World Health Organization (WHO) – which was advising against travel bans just as the Wuhan virus was exploding into a global pandemic, and wouldn’t even admit it was a “pandemic” until one week ago, when it became impossible to deny the truth – and is now expelling foreign journalists, cutting off the meager trickle of clean information to the outside world.

China is far too opaque, far too dismissive of basic human rights, to be welcomed into reputable international organizations as a full member. The CCP corrupts every organization it joins. It should be expelled from all of them, or relegated to observer status only. WHO could begin this process by correcting the unspeakable injustice of excluding Taiwan to protect China’s vanity. Taiwan should be a full member of WHO, and China should be an observer at best.

That assumes WHO cleans out all of the officials who bowed to the CCP’s demands and becomes an organization worth belonging to. Taiwan’s exemplary handling of the coronavirus may actually have been helped by not being a member of the World Health Organization, insulating the island from Beijing’s propaganda and political demands. What clearer signal could there be that China’s rulers must be quarantined before they can infect any more important international structures with their politics?

The world was left no choice but to handle China this way. It was probably inevitable, communism and fascism being what they are. It’s on us for letting things fester until now because some globalists wanted to get rich quick, and some ideologues can’t call evil when they see it.

China’s system is nominally communist, but its current incarnation is closer to fascism in the most important ways, including the illusion of private commerce dominated and controlled by the CCP. The world must understand there is no such thing as an independent Chinese business or billionaire. Everyone and everything is subject to Party control.

The CCP moved toward fascism – privately “owned” capital that is completely subservient to the authoritarian central government – because it’s more effective than communism, and because they knew globalist business tycoons in the outside world would be more willing to cut deals with nominally private corporations than communally-owned state enterprises. To put it bluntly, fascism can speak the language of capitalism far more convincingly, if no more honestly, than pure communism.

How did the rest of the world allow itself to forget the importance of containing and defeating fascism and communism? We fought an insanely destructive world war to beat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, then a half-century twilight struggle to bring down the Soviet Union. A few years after the Berlin Wall fell, globalists hungry to crack into China’s market and access its cheap labor convinced everyone to forget that communism is incredibly dangerous. The coronavirus is only the latest reminder of a lesson we should never have forgotten, a lesson our forefathers wrote for us in deep red blood and inky black terror.

The notion that economic and cultural “engagement” will liberalize China should be killed stone dead by the Wuhan epidemic. It should have died a long time ago since engagement hasn’t done much to liberalize anyone else. Western intellectuals thought the Soviet Union fell because the Russian people were hungry for blue jeans and rock & roll. They thought they could apply that formula to crack open other authoritarian systems.

Meanwhile, the authoritarians were carefully studying the fall of the Soviet Union and laying plans to ensure such a fate could never befall their squalid tyrannies. For that matter, Russia hasn’t grown much less authoritarian since the End of History in the Nineties, and it’s still a dangerous global adversary.

On the other side of the coin, engagement is clearly threatening to make the free world more authoritarian. Dictatorial ideas like speech codes are spreading across the West. The Chinese Communist Party has far more influence over Hollywood than American citizens living in flyover country. The CCP can force airlines to change their websites and retail outlets to yank T-shirts off the rack because they offend Beijing’s political sensibilities. The CCP even got WHO to change its epidemic map in the depths of the coronavirus crisis because they insisted the map had to identify Taiwan as part of China and include “mainland” infections to inflate Taiwan’s amazingly low total.

Just as the coronavirus must be quarantined before it infects the most vulnerable people of the world, so the Chinese Communist Party must be quarantined before it infects more vulnerable systems across the free world. With an aggressive containment policy, the CCP can be stripped of the money and power it needs to pursue its imperialist foreign agenda and weakened until the people of China can rise up against it.

The time is ripe because the CCP has overextended itself with a massive military buildup and its Belt and Road Initiative, which is a new form of colonialism disguised as an infrastructure program. The disguise is very expensive. Now is the perfect time to begin economic disengagement from China, leaving the CCP with a lot of bills it cannot pay and debts it cannot collect.

The CCP is brutal and seems like an unbeatable foe to its captive people, but it really isn’t. The coronavirus clearly revealed how many Party men are incompetent morons, vicious liars, and simpering cowards. Hong Kong’s long months of bravely defying the CCP is an example, and they’re tiny. A few thousand students in Tiananmen Square looked like an existential threat to the terrified rulers of China, so they crushed the uprising with an act of bloody murder they are still trying to justify, or better yet erase from the history books – with a little help from the Western tech companies the CCP has so much leverage over, of course.

The Chinese are a great people with a long history of daring achievements. They can defeat the Communist Party. The face of China isn’t just the Party hack babbling about America creating the coronavirus. The face of China is also Hong Kong and Taiwan. The face of China is Dr. Li Wenliang, ruthlessly silenced by the CCP for trying to sound an early coronavirus warning that would have saved billions of dollars and thousands of lives across the world, including his own. The face of China is the Nobel Prize winner who should have been sitting in the empty chair set out for him in Oslo. The courage of a thousand generations echoes in the voices of those who speak out against the CCP knowing it could make them disappear at any moment.

It’s time for the people of China to decide which face they will show the world in the century to come. It’s up to all of us, across the free and civilized world, to make it very clear what the consequences of leaving the Communist Party in charge will be.