Washington Free Beacon senior editor Bill Gertz said on Friday that under Chinese president Xi Jinping, the communist state has become a "communist nightmare."

Gertz appeared on The Mark Levin Show to promote his new book, Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China's Drive for Global Supremacy, in which he describes how the "China threat" has transformed radically since the 1980s.

"It really took a turn for the worse under the regime of Xi Jinping, the current Chinese leader, who has advanced what he calls the China Dream, which is really a communist nightmare," Gertz said. "He has his eyes set on global hegemony, he wants China to be the dominant superpower in the world, and in order to do that, he has to diminish the power of the United States."

Gertz added that although Xi's family was purged by Chinese authorities prior to his taking office in 2013, the move only hardened him as a radical communist. Upon ascending to the control of the state, Gertz said, Xi has moved into Mao Zedong's residence, which had been a museum since the dictator's death.

"Xi Jinping has become the new Mao, the new emperor," Gertz said.

Prior to President Donald Trump's administration, the United States had been largely ineffective in combating China, according to Gertz.

"For the last 40 years, we've been involved in a gamble that says if we just trade with China, if we're just nice with China, then that's going to turn it into a benign non-communist power, and that's been an utter failure," Gertz said. "Donald Trump is the first one to recognize that, so he's the one that's taking tough action across the board, primarily in the economic sphere, but it's impacting all the other spheres."

Gertz said that Trump's administration has also cracked down on China in areas of law enforcement, intelligence gathering, and spying. These steps against China are taking a toll on the country, but often it is difficult to tell to what degree, Gertz added, saying that for the time being, Xi's regime appears "stable."

"Very much like the Soviet Union, no one predicted when the Soviet Union was going to collapse," he said. "The same thing could happen with China. Again, with a little bit of pressure, the whole thing could come crumbling down in Beijing."