Today is election day, especially in New York City. Many young people in the town, including young Chinese, says they’re voting for the communist for mayor. Song Ying, who remembers her escape from the Chinese communist regime—in 1976, she “swam for eight hours from Shenzhen, then a small fishing village, to Hong Kong”—is not in favor of the communist candidate, Zohran Mamdani (The New York Times, November 2, 2025).
Ms. Song and her husband arrived in the United States in 1978 with nothing. They borrowed $168 to pay their first month’s rent in Chinatown and hustled to build a life. She became a reporter for a Chinese-language newspaper while he started a small telecom business. One of their sons graduated from Cornell, the other from M.I.T. Both have professional careers—the kind of American success story that once symbolized immigrant hope.
Ms. Song’s political convictions are rooted in the country she fled. “Socialism has been a disaster,” she said. “Everything I’ve seen and experienced points to that. It breeds laziness and kills the motivation to strive.”
To her, Mr. Mamdani’s proposals sound like echoes from her past.
To her, not to reporter Li Yuan. The reporter is too smart to see any major and disturbing connection between what is politically possible for an aspiring overt socialist and communist in modern New York to promise during a campaign and what was possible and happened under the “vastly different…Marxist socialism that was practiced by China under Chairman Mao Zedong.”
Yuan quotes several young people who are all in favor of free stuff and seem to see no connection between past government policies and any current problems in New York. If they know somebody who has had problems paying the bills, they regard this difficulty as proof that somebody (else) should be paying those bills.
True, Mamdani is not Mao
To be sure, raising taxes on the rich “to fund programs like free child care, buses and city-owned grocery stores” is not the same as continuous wholesale destruction of livelihoods and continuous mass murder. Mamdani has not pledged to release the Red Guards. Maybe there’s a continuum: degrees of contempt for the rights of others. Mamdani is pretty far along the continuum, but not far enough along to ignite the concern of many who see the benefit of free stuff paid for by others. How far along he is we may not know until he’s been in office a while.
Some of New York’s incipient and veteran young communists may recant, later, if Mamdani gets elected and has any success imposing his egalitarian, pro-terrorist and communist vision. Knocked over the head by experience, these Mamdanites may come to realize the problem with demanding loads of Free Stuff while destroying and scaring away those who produce the stuff.
But if they are then able to relate the news to the policies, they should be able right now to relate the proposed policies to history, economics, moral philosophy. We’ve already got the experience, available for anybody to consult.
Even nonreaders can be devoid of criminal mentality, of course. Young and dumb or young and inclined to rob thy neighbor is not an inevitable condition. It’s a choice. It’s possible to be young, eager to learn, responsible, moral—wanting to make something of oneself and work for a living and ignoring any peer pressure to loot others who are working for a living.
Nobody of any age has to be a looter either directly or indirectly by electorally delegating the task to the likes of Mamdani.
