Commentary 3: On the Tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party
FOREWORD
When speaking about tyranny, most Chinese people are reminded of Qin Shi Huang (259-210 B.C.), the first Emperor of the Qin Dynasty, whose oppressive court burnt philosophical books and buried Confucian scholars alive. Qin Shi Huang’s harsh treatment of his people came from his policy of “supporting his rule with all of the resources under heaven.” [1] This policy had four main aspects: excessively heavy taxation; wasting human labor for projects to glorify himself; brutal torture under harsh laws and punishing even the offenders’ family members and neighbors; and controlling people’s minds by blocking all avenues of free thinking and expression through burning books and even burying scholars alive. Under the rule of Qin Shi Huang, China had a population of about 10 million; Qin’s court drafted over 2 million to perform forced labor. Qin Shi Huang brought his harsh laws into the intellectual realm, prohibiting freedom of thought on a massive scale. During his rule, thousands of Confucian scholars and officials who criticized the government were killed.
Today the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s violence and abuses are even more severe than those of the tyrannical Qin Dynasty. The CCP’s philosophy is one of “struggle,” and the CCP’s rule has been built upon a series of “class struggles,” “path struggles,” and “ideological struggles,” both in China and toward other nations. Mao Zedong, the first CCP leader of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), put it bluntly by saying, “What can Emperor Qin Shihuang brag about? He only killed 460 Confucian scholars, but we killed 46,000 intellectuals. There are people who accuse us of practicing dictatorship like Emperor Qin Shihuang and we admit it all. It fits the reality. It is a pity that they did not give us enough credit, so we need to add to it.” [2]
Let’s take a look at China’s arduous 55 years under the rule of the CCP. As its founding philosophy is one of “class struggle,” the CCP has spared no efforts since taking power to commit class genocide, and has achieved its reign of terror by means of violent revolution. Killing and brainwashing have been used hand in hand to suppress any beliefs other than communist theory. The CCP has launched one movement after another to portray itself as infallible and godlike. Following its theories of class struggle and violent revolution, the CCP has tried to purge dissidents and opposing social classes, using violence and deception to force all Chinese people to become the obedient servants of its tyrannical rule.
I. LAND REFORM—ELIMINATING THE LANDLORD CLASS
Barely three months after the founding of communist China, the CCP called for the elimination of the landlord class as one of the guidelines for its nationwide land reform program. The party’s slogan “land to the tiller” indulged the selfish side of the landless peasants, encouraged them to struggle with the landowners by whatever means and to disregard the moral implications of their actions. The land reform campaign explicitly stipulated eliminating the landlord class, and classified the rural population into different social categories. Twenty million rural inhabitants nationwide were labeled as “landlords, rich peasants, reactionaries, or bad elements.” These new outcasts faced discrimination, humiliation, and loss of all their civil rights. As the land reform campaign extended its reach to remote areas and the villages of ethnic minorities, the CCP’s organizations also expanded quickly. Township Party committees and village Party branches spread all over China. The local branches were the mouthpiece for passing instructions from the CCP’s Central Committee and were at the frontline of the class struggle, inciting peasants to rise up against their landlords. Nearly 100,000 landlords died during this movement. In certain areas the CCP and the peasants killed the landlords’ entire families, disregarding gender or age, as a way to wipe out completely the landlord class.
In the meantime, the CCP launched its first wave of propaganda, declaring that “Chairman Mao is the great savior of the people” and that “only the CCP can save China.” During the land reform, landless farmers got what they wanted through the CCP’s policy of reaping without laboring, robbing without concern for the means. Poor peasants credited the CCP for the improvement in their lives and so accepted the CCP’s propaganda that the Party worked for the interests of the people.
For the owners of the newly acquired land, the good days of “land to the tiller” were short-lived. Within two years, the CCP imposed a number of practices on the farmers such as mutual-aid groups, primary cooperatives, advanced cooperatives, and people’s communes. Using the slogan of criticizing “women with bound feet”—i.e., those who are slow paced—the CCP drove and pushed, year after year, urging peasants to “dash” into socialism. With grain, cotton, and cooking oil placed under a unified procurement system nationwide, the major agricultural products were excluded from market exchange. In addition, the CCP established a residential registration system, barring peasants from going to the cities to find work or dwell. Those who are registered as rural residents were not allowed to buy grain at state-run stores and their children were prohibited from receiving education in cities. Peasants’ children could only be peasants, turning 360 million rural residents of the early 1950s into second-class citizens.
Beginning in 1978, in the first five years after moving from a collective system to a household contract system, some among the 900 million peasants became better off, with their income increasing slightly and their social status improving somewhat. However, such a meager benefit was soon lost due to a price structure that favored industrial commodities over agricultural goods; peasants plunged into poverty once again. The income gap between the urban and rural population has drastically increased, and economic disparity continues to widen. New landlords and rich peasants have re-emerged in the rural areas. Data from Xinhua News Agency, the CCP’s mouthpiece, show that since 1997, the revenue of the major grain production areas and the income of most rural households have been at a standstill, or even declined in some cases. In other words, the peasants’ gain from agricultural production did not really increase. The ratio of urban to rural incomes has increased from 1.8 to 1 in the mid 1980s to 3.1 to 1 today.
II. REFORMS IN INDUSTRY AND COMMERCE—ELIMINATING THE CAPITALIST CLASS
Another class that the CCP wanted to eliminate was the national bourgeoisie who owned capital in cities and rural towns. While reforming China’s industry and commerce, the CCP claimed that the capitalist class and the working class were different in nature: the former was the exploiting class while the latter was the non-exploiting and anti-exploiting class. According to this logic, the capitalist class was born to exploit and wouldn’t stop doing so until it perished; it could only be eliminated, not reformed. Under such premises, the CCP used both killing and brainwashing to transform capitalists and merchants. The CCP used its long-tested method of supporting the obedient and destroying those who disagreed. If you surrendered your assets to the state and supported the CCP, you were considered just a minor problem among the people. If, on the other hand, you disagreed with or complained about the CCP’s policy, you would be labeled as a reactionary and become the target of the CCP’s draconian dictatorship.
During the reign of terror that ensued during these reforms, capitalists and business owners all surrendered their assets. Many of them couldn’t bear the humiliation they faced and committed suicide. Chen Yi, then mayor of Shanghai, asked every day, “How many paratroopers are there today?” referring to the number of capitalists that had committed suicide by jumping from the tops of buildings that day. In only a few years, the CCP completely eliminated private ownership in China.
While carrying out its land and industrial reform programs, the CCP launched many massive movements that persecuted the Chinese people. These movements included: the suppression of “counter-revolutionaries,” thought reform campaigns, cleansing the anti-CCP clique headed by Gao Gang and Rao Shushi, and probing Hu Feng’s [3] “counter-revolutionary” group, Three Anti Campaign, Five Anti Campaign, and the further cleansing of counterrevolutionaries. The CCP used these movements to target and brutally persecute countless innocent people. In every political movement, the CCP fully utilized its control of government resources in conjunction with the Party’s committees, branches, and sub-branches. Three party members would form a small combat team, infiltrating all villages and neighborhoods. These combat teams were ubiquitous, leaving no stone unturned. This deeply-entrenched Party control network, inherited from the CCP’s network of “Party branches installed within the army” during the war years, has since played a key role in later political movements.
III. CRACKDOWN ON RELIGIONS AND RELIGIOUS GROUPS
The CCP committed another atrocity in the brutal suppression of religion and the complete ban of all grass-roots religious groups following the founding of the People’s Republic of China. In 1950, the CCP instructed its local governments to ban all unofficial religious faiths and secret societies. The CCP stated that those “feudalistic” underground groups were mere tools in the hands of landlords, rich farmers, reactionaries, and the special agents of the KMT. In the nationwide crackdown, the government mobilized the classes they trusted to identify and persecute members of religious groups. Governments at various levels were directly involved in disbanding such “superstitious groups” as communities of Christians, Catholics, Taoists (especially believers of I-Kuan Tao), and Buddhists. They ordered all members of these churches, temples, and religious societies to register with government agencies and to repent for their involvement. Failure to do so would mean severe punishment. In 1951, the government formally promulgated regulations threatening that those who continued their activities in unofficial religious groups would face a life sentence or a death penalty.
This movement persecuted a large number of kind-hearted and law-abiding believers in God. Incomplete statistics indicate that the CCP in the 1950s persecuted at least three million religious believers and underground group members, some of whom were killed. The CCP searched almost every household across the nation and interrogated its members, even smashing statues of the Kitchen God that Chinese peasants traditionally worshipped. The executions reinforced the CCP’s message that communist ideology was the only legitimate ideology and the only legitimate faith. The concept of “patriotic” believers soon emerged. The state constitution protected only “patriotic” believers. The reality was whatever religion one believed in, there was only one criterion: you had to follow the CCP’s instructions and you had to acknowledge that the CCP was above all religions. If you were a Christian, the CCP was the god of the Christian God. If you were a Buddhist, the CCP was the Master Buddha of the Master Buddha. Among Muslims, the CCP was the Allah of the Allah. When it came to the Living Buddha in Tibetan Buddhism, the CCP would intervene and itself choose who the Living Buddha would be. The CCP left you no choice but to say and do what the CCP demanded you to say and do. All believers were forced to carry out the CCP’s objectives while upholding their respective faiths in name only. Failing to do so would make one the target of the CCP’s persecution and dictatorship.
According to a February 22, 2002 report by Humanity and Human Rights online magazine, twenty thousand Christians conducted a survey among 560,000 Christians in house churches in 207 cities in 22 provinces in China. The survey found that among house church attendees, 130,000 were under government surveillance. In the book How the Chinese Communist Party Persecuted Christians (1958), it is stated that by 1957, the CCP had killed over 11,000 religious adherents and had arbitrarily arrested and extorted money from many more.
By eliminating the landlord class and the capitalist class and by persecuting large numbers of God-worshipping and law-abiding people, the CCP cleared the way for Communism to become the all-encompassing religion of China.
IV. THE ANTI-RIGHTIST MOVEMENT—NATIONWIDE BRAINWASHING
In 1956, a group of Hungarian intellectuals formed the Petofi Circle, which held forums and debates critical of the Hungarian government. The group sparked a nationwide revolution in Hungary, which was crushed by Soviet soldiers. Mao Zedong took this “Hungarian Event” as a lesson. In 1957, Mao called upon the Chinese intellectuals and other people to “help the CCP rectify itself.” This movement, known as the “Hundred Flowers Movement” for short, followed the slogan of “letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend.” Mao’s purpose was to lure out the “anti-Party elements” among the people. In his letter to provincial Party chiefs in 1957, Mao Zedong spoke his intention of “luring the snakes out of their holes” by letting them air their views freely in the name of freedom of thought and rectifying the CCP.
Slogans at the time encouraged people to speak up and promised no reprisals—the Party would not “grab pigtails, strike with sticks, issue hats, or settle accounts after the autumn,” meaning the party would not find fault, make attacks, place labels, or seek to retaliate. Yet soon the CCP initiated an “anti-rightist” movement, declaring 540,000 of the people who dared to speak up as “rightists.” Among them, 270,000 lost their jobs and 230,000 were labeled as “medium rightists” or “anti-CCP anti-socialist elements.” Later some summarized the CCP’s political stratagems of persecution into four items: Luring the snakes out of holes; fabricating crimes, attacking suddenly, and punishing with a single accusation; attacking relentlessly in the name of saving people; and forcing self-criticism and using the most severe labels.
What then were the “reactionary speeches” that had caused so many rightists and anti-communists to be exiled for nearly 30 years in far-flung corners of the nation? The “three major reactionary theories,” the targets of general and intensive assaults at the time, consisted of a few speeches by Luo Longji, Zhang Bojun, and Chu Anping. A closer look at what they proposed and suggested shows that their wishes were quite benign.
Luo suggested forming a joint commission of the CCP and various “democratic” parties to investigate the deviations in the “Three Anti Campaign” and “Five Anti Campaign,” and the movements for purging reactionaries. The State Council itself often presented something to the Political Consultative Committee and the People’s Congress for observations and comments, and Zhang suggested the Political Consultative Committee and the People’s Congress should be included in the decision-making process.
Chu suggested that since non-CCP members also had good ideas, self-esteem, and a sense of responsibility as well, there was no need to assign a CCP member across the nation as the head of every work unit, big or small, or even for the teams under each work unit. There was also no need that everything, major or minor, had to be done the way the CCP members suggested. All three had expressed their willingness to follow the CCP and none of their suggestions had exceeded the boundaries demarcated by the famous words of writer and critic Lu Xun [4], “My master, your gown has become dirty. Please take it off and I will wash it for you.” Like Lu Xun, these “rightists” expressed docility, submissiveness and respect.
None of the condemned “rightists” suggested that the CCP should be overthrown; all they had offered was constructive criticism. Yet precisely because of these suggestions, tens of thousands of people lost their freedom, and millions of families suffered. What followed were more movements such as “confiding to the CCP,” digging out the hardliners, the new “Three Anti Campaign,” sending intellectuals to the countryside to do hard labor, and catching the rightists who were missed the first time around. Whoever had a disagreement with the leader of the workplace, especially the party secretaries, would be labeled as anti-CCP. The CCP would often subject them to constant criticism, or send them to labor camps for forced reeducation. Sometimes the Party relocated whole families to rural areas, and barred their children from going to college or joining the army. They couldn’t apply for jobs in cities or towns either. The families would lose their job security and public health benefits. They became lowly members of the peasant rank and outcasts even among second-class citizens.
After the persecution of the intellectuals, some scholars developed a two-faced personality. They followed closely the “Red Sun” and became the CCP’s “court-appointed intellectuals,” doing or saying whatever the CCP asked. Some others became aloof and distanced themselves from political matters. Chinese intellectuals, who have traditionally had a strong sense of responsibility towards the nation, have been silenced ever since.
V. THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD—CREATING FALSEHOODS TO TEST PEOPLE’S LOYALTY
After the Anti-Rightist Movement, China became afraid of truth. Everyone joined in listening to false words, telling false tales, making up false stories, and avoiding and covering up the truth through lies and rumors. The Great Leap Forward was a nationwide collective exercise in lying. The people of the entire nation, under the direction of the CCP’s evil specter, did many ridiculous things. Both liars and those being lied to were betrayed. In this campaign of lies and ridiculous actions, the CCP implanted its violent, evil energy into the spiritual world of the Chinese people. At the time, many people sang songs promoting the Great Leap Forward, “I am the Jade Emperor and I am the Dragon King. I order the three mountains and five gorges to step aside, here I come!” [5] Policies such as “achieving a grain production of 75,000 kg per hectare,” “doubling steel production,” and “surpassing Britain in 10 years and the US in 15 years” were attempted year after year. These policies resulted in a grave, nationwide famine that cost millions of lives.
During the eighth plenum of the Eighth CCP Central Committee meeting held in Lushan in 1959, who among the participants did not agree with General Peng Dehuai’s [6] view that the Great Leap Forward initiated by Mao Zedong was foolish? However, supporting Mao’s policy or not marked the line between loyalty or betrayal, or the line between life and death. In a story from Chinese history, when Zhao Gao [7] claimed that a deer was a horse, he knew the difference between a deer and a horse, but he purposefully called a deer a horse to control public opinion, silence debates, and expand his own power. The result of the Lushan Plenum was that even Peng Dehuai was forced to sign a resolution condemning and purging himself from the central government. Similarly, in the later years of the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping was forced to promise that he would never appeal against the government’s decision to remove him from his posts.
Society relies on past experience to understand the world and expand its horizons. The CCP, however, has taken away opportunities from the people to learn from historical experience and lessons. The official censorship of the media has only helped further lower people’s capacity to discern good from bad. After each political movement, the younger generations have only been given the Party’s uplifting accounts, but have been deprived of the analyses, ideals, and experiences of the insightful people from older generations. As a result, people have only scattered information as the basis for understanding history and judging new events, thinking themselves correct while deviating thousands of miles from the truth. Thus the CCP’s policy of keeping people ignorant has been carried out thoroughly.
VI. THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION—THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN BY EVIL POSSESSION
The Cultural Revolution was a grand performance put up by the communist specter as it possessed the entire China. In 1966, a new wave of violence rolled onto China’s land, and an uncontrollable red terror shook the mountains and froze the rivers. Writer Qin Mu described the Cultural Revolution in bleak terms:
It was truly an unprecedented calamity: [the CCP] imprisoned millions due to their association with a [targeted] family member, ended the lives of millions more, shattered families, turned children into hoodlums and villains, burned books, tore down ancient buildings, and destroyed ancient intellectuals’ gravesites, committing all kinds of crimes in the name of revolution.
Conservative figures place the number of unnatural deaths in China during the Cultural Revolution at 7.73 million.
People often mistakenly think that the violence and slaughter during the Cultural Revolution happened mostly during the rebel movements, and that it was the Red Guards and rebels who committed the killing. However, thousands of officially published Chinese county annuals indicate that the peak of unnatural deaths during the Cultural Revolution was not in 1966, when the Red Guards controlled most of the government organizations, or in 1967 when the rebels fought among different groups with weapons, but rather in 1968 when Mao regained control over the entire country. The murderers in those infamous cases were often army officers and soldiers, armed militiamen, and CCP members at all levels of the government.
The following examples illustrate how the violence during the Cultural Revolution was the policy of the CCP and the regional government, not the extreme behavior of the Red Guards. The CCP has covered up the direct instigation of and involvement in the violence by party leaders and government officials.
In August 1966, the Red Guards expelled Beijing residents who had been classified in past movements as “landlords, rich farmers, reactionaries, bad elements, and rightists” and forced them to the countryside. Incomplete official statistics showed that 33,695 homes were searched and 85,196 Beijing residents were expelled out of the city and sent back to where their parents had originally come from. Red Guards all over the country followed suit, expelling over 400,000 urban residents to the countryside. Even high-ranking officials, whose parents were landlords, faced exile to the country.
Actually, the CCP planned the expulsion campaign even before the Cultural Revolution began. Former Beijing mayor Peng Zhen declared that the residents of Beijing City should be as ideologically pure as “glass panels and crystals,” meaning that all residents with a bad class background would be expelled out of the city. In May of 1966, Mao commanded his subordinates to “protect the capital.” A capital working team was set up, led by Ye Jianying, Yang Chengwu and Xie Fuzhi. One of the tasks of this team was to use the police to expel Beijing residents of bad class background.
This history helps make clear why the government and police departments did not intervene but rather supported the Red Guards in searching homes and expelling more than two percent of Beijing residents. The Minister of Public Security, Xie Fuzhi, required the police not to intervene in the Red Guards’ actions but rather to provide advice and information to them. The Red Guards were simply utilized by the Party to carry out a planned action, and then, at the end of 1966, these Red Guards were abandoned by the CCP. Many were labeled counterrevolutionaries and imprisoned, and others were sent to the countryside, along with other urban youth, to labor and reform their thoughts. The West Town Red Guard organization, which led the expulsion of city residents, was established under the “caring” guidance of the CCP leaders. The order to incriminate these Red Guards was also issued after being revised by the secretary-general of the State Council.
Following the removal of the Beijing residents of bad class background, the rural areas started another round of persecution of bad class elements. On August 26, 1966, a speech of Xie Fuzhi was passed down to the Daxing Police Bureau at their work meeting. Xie ordered the police to assist the Red Guards in searching the homes of the “five black classes” (landlords, rich peasants, reactionaries, bad elements, and rightists) by providing advice and information and helping in their raids. The infamous Daxing Massacre [8] occurred as a result of direct instructions by the police department; the organizers were the director and the CCP secretary of the police department, and the killers were mostly militiamen who did not even spare the children.
Many were admitted into the CCP for their “good behavior” during similar slaughters. According to incomplete statistics for Guangxi Province, about 50,000 CCP members engaged in killing. Among them more than 9,000 were admitted into the Party shortly after killing someone, more than 20,000 committed murder after being admitted into the Party, and more than 19,000 other Party members were involved in killing in one way or another.
During the Cultural Revolution, class theory would also be applied to beatings. The bad deserved it if they were beaten by the good. It was honorable for a bad person to beat another bad person. It was a misunderstanding if a good person beat another good person. Such a theory invented by Mao was spread widely in the rebel movements. Violence and slaughter were widespread following the logic that the enemies of the class struggle deserved any violence against them.
From August 13 to October 7 of 1967, militiamen in Dao County of Hunan Province slaughtered members of the “Xiangjiang Wind and Thunder” organization and those of the “five black classes.” The slaughter lasted 66 days; more than 4,519 people in 2,778 households were killed in 468 brigades (administrative villages) of 36 people’s communes in 10 districts. In the entire prefecture consisting of 10 counties, a total of 9,093 people were killed, of which 38% were of the “five black classes” and 44% were their children. The oldest person killed was 78 years old, and the youngest was only 10 days old.
This is only one case of violence in one small area during the Cultural Revolution. In Inner Mongolia, after the establishment of the “revolutionary committee” in early 1968, the cleansing of class rank and purging of the fabricated “Inner Mongolia People’s Revolutionary Party” killed more than 350,000 people. In 1968, tens of thousands of people in Guangxi Province participated in the mass slaughter of the rebel faction “422” organization, killing more than 110,000.
These cases point out that those major acts of violent killing during the Cultural Revolution were all under the direct instigation and instruction of CCP leaders who encouraged and utilized violence to persecute and kill citizens. Those killers directly involved in instructing and executing the killing were mostly from the military, police, armed militia, and key members of the Party and the Youth League.
If during the Land Reform the CCP used peasants to overthrow landlords to obtain land, during the Industrial and Commercial Reform the CCP used the working class to overthrow capitalists to gain assets, and during the Anti-Rightist Movement the CCP eliminated all intellectuals who held opposing opinions, then what was the purpose of all the killing during the Cultural Revolution? The CCP used one group to kill another, and no one class was relied upon. Even if you were from the workers and peasants, two classes upon which the Party relied in the past, if your viewpoint differed from that of the Party, your life would be in danger. So in the end, what was it all for?
The purpose was to establish communism as the one and only religion dominating the entire country, controlling not just the state but every individual’s mind.
The Cultural Revolution pushed the CCP and Mao Zedong’s cult of personality to a climax. Mao’s theory had to be used to dictate everything and one person’s vision had to be embedded in tens of millions of people’s minds. The Cultural Revolution, in a way unprecedented and never again to be matched, intentionally did not specify what could not be done. Instead, the Party emphasized “what can be done and how to do it. Anything outside this boundary could not be done or even considered.”
During the Cultural Revolution, everyone in the country carried out a religious-like ritual: “ask the Party for instructions in the morning and report to the Party in the evening,” salute Chairman Mao several times a day, wishing him boundless longevity, and conduct morning and evening political prayers everyday. Nearly every literate person had the experience of writing self-criticism and thought reports. Mao’s quotations such as the following were frequently recited. “Fight ferociously against every passing thought of selfishness.” “Execute instructions whether or not you understood them; deepen your understanding in the process of execution.”
Only one “god” (Mao) was allowed to be worshiped; only one kind of scripture (Mao’s teaching) was allowed to be studied. Soon the “god-making” process progressed to such a degree that people could not buy food in canteens if they did not recite a quotation or make a greeting to Mao. When shopping, riding the bus, or even making a phone call, one had to recite one of Mao’s quotations, even if it was totally irrelevant. In these rituals of worship, people were either fanatical or cynical, and in either case were already under the control of the communist evil specter. Producing lies, tolerating lies and relying on lies became Chinese people’s lifestyle.
VII. THE REFORM AND OPENING UP—THE VIOLENCE PROGRESSES WITH TIME
The Cultural Revolution was a period full of bloodshed, killings, grievances, loss of conscience, and confusion of right and wrong. After the Cultural Revolution, the CCP leadership changed its banners frequently, as the government changed hands six times within 20 years. Private ownership has returned to China, disparities in the standard of living between cities and rural areas have widened, the desert area has quickly expanded, river water has been drying up, and drug-use and prostitution have increased. All the “crimes” the CCP fought against are now permitted again.
The CCP’s ruthless heart, devious nature, evil actions, and ability to bring ruin to the country increased. During the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, the Party mobilized armies and tanks to kill students protesting on Tiananmen Square. The vicious persecution against Falun Gong practitioners is even worse. In October of 2004, to take land from the peasants, Yulin City of Shaanxi Province mobilized over 1,600 riot police to arrest and shoot more than 50 peasants. The political control of the Chinese government continues to rely on the CCP’s philosophy of struggle and violence. The only difference from the past is that the Party has become even more deceptive.
Law Making: The CCP has never stopped creating conflicts among the people. They have persecuted large numbers of citizens for being reactionaries, anti-socialists, bad elements, and evil cult members. The totalitarian nature of the CCP continues to conflict with all other civil groups and organizations. In the name of “maintaining order and stabilizing society,” the Party has kept changing constitutions, laws and regulations, and has persecuted as reactionaries anyone who disagrees with the government.
In July of 1999, Jiang Zemin made a personal decision, against most other Politburo members’ wills, to eliminate Falun Gong in three months; slander and lies quickly enveloped the country. After Jiang Zemin denounced Falun Gong as an “evil cult” in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, Chinese official propaganda followed up by quickly publishing articles pressuring everyone in the country to turn against Falun Gong. The National People’s Congress was coerced into passing a non-descript “decision” dealing with evil cults; soon after that the Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate jointly issued an “explanation” of the “decision.”
On July 22, 1999, the Xinhua News Agency published speeches by the CCP’s Organization Department and Propaganda Department leaders publicly supporting Jiang’s persecution against Falun Gong. The Chinese people became enmeshed in the persecution simply because it was a decision made by the Party. They can only obey orders and dare not raise any objections.
Over the past five years, the government has utilized one-fourth of the nation’s financial resources to persecute Falun Gong. Everyone in the country has had to pass a test; most who admitted to practicing Falun Gong but refused to give up the practice have lost their jobs; some are sentenced to forced labor. The Falun Gong practitioners have not violated any laws, nor have they betrayed the country or opposed the government; they have only believed in “Truthfulness, Compassion, and Tolerance.” Yet hundreds of thousands were imprisoned. While the CCP has enforced a tight blockade of information, more than 1,100 people have been confirmed by their families to have been tortured to death; the true number of deaths is much higher.
News Reporting: On October 15, 2004, Hong Kong-based Wenweipao reported that China’s 20th satellite returned to earth, falling on and destroying the house of Huo Jiyu in Penglai Township, located in Dayin County, Sichuan Province. The report quoted Dayin County government office director Ai Yuqing saying that the “black lump” was confirmed to be the satellite. Ai was himself the on-site deputy director of the satellite recovery project. However, Xinhua News only reported the time of the satellite’s recovery, emphasizing that this was the 20th scientific and technical experimental satellite recovered by China. Xinhua News did not mention a word about the satellite destroying a house. This is a typical example of the Chinese news media’s consistent practice of reporting only the good news and covering up the bad news, as instructed by the Party.
Lies and slander published by newspapers and broadcast on television have greatly assisted the execution of the CCP’s policies in all past political movements. The Party’s command would be instantly executed by the media in the country. When the Party wanted to start an Anti-Rightist Movement, media all over China reported with one voice the crimes of rightists. When the Party wanted to set up the people’s communes, every newspaper in the nation started to praise the superiority of people’s communes. Within the first month of the persecution of Falun Gong, all television and radio stations slandered Falun Gong repeatedly in their prime time broadcasting in order to brainwash people. Since then, Jiang has utilized all media repeatedly to fabricate and spread lies and slanders about Falun Gong. This includes the effort to incite nationwide hatred against Falun Gong by reporting false news about Falun Gong practitioners committing murder and suicide. An example of such false reporting is the staged “Tiananmen Self-Immolation” incident, which was criticized by the NGO International Educational Development as a government-staged action to deceive people. In the past five years, no mainland Chinese newspaper or TV station has reported the truth about Falun Gong.
Chinese people are used to the false news reports. A senior reporter of Xinhua News Agency once said, “How could you trust a Xinhua report?” People have even described Chinese news agencies as the Party’s dog. A folk song has it: “It is a dog raised by the Party, guarding the Party’s gate. It would bite anyone the Party wants it to bite, and bite however many times the Party wants it to.”
Education: In China, education became another tool used to control people. The original purpose of education was to develop intellectuals to have both knowledge and correct judgment. Knowledge refers to the understanding of information, data and historical events; judgment refers to the process of analyzing, investigating, critiquing, and reproducing such knowledge—a process of spiritual development. Those who have knowledge without proper judgment are referred to as bookworms, not true intellectuals with a social conscience. This is why in Chinese history it is the intellectuals with righteous judgment, not those having merely knowledge, who have been highly respected. Under the CCP’s control, however, China is filled with intellectuals who have knowledge but not judgment, or who dare not exercise judgment. Education in schools focused on teaching students not to do things that the Party did not want them to do. In recent years, all schools started to teach politics and CCP history with unified textbooks. The teachers did not believe the content of the text, yet they were forced by the Party “discipline” to teach it against their wills. The students did not believe the text or their teachers, yet they had to remember everything in the text in order to pass the exams. Recently, questions about Falun Gong were included in term and entrance exams for colleges and high schools. Students who do not know the standard answers do not get high scores to enter good colleges or high schools. If a student dares to speak the truth, he will be expelled from school immediately and lose any chance of formal education.
In the public education system, due to the influence of the newspapers and government documents, many well known sayings or phrases have been spread as truth, such as Mao’s quotation “We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports.” The negative effect is widespread: it has poisoned people’s hearts, supplanting benevolence and destroying the moral principle of living in peace and harmony.
In 2004, the China Information Center analyzed a survey done by the China Sina Net, and the results show that 82.6 percent of Chinese youth agreed that one can abuse women, children and prisoners during a war. This result is shocking. But it reflects the Chinese people’s mindset, and especially that of the younger generation, who lack a basic understanding of either the traditional cultural concept of benevolent rule or the notion of universal humanity.
On September 11, 2004, a man fanatically slashed 28 children with a knife in Suzhou City. On the 20th of the same month, a man in Shandong Province injured 25 elementary school students with a knife. Some elementary school teachers forced students to make firecrackers by hand to raise funds for the school, resulting in an explosion in which students died.
Implementing Policies: The CCP leadership has often used threats and coercion to ensure the implementation of their policies. One of the means they used was the political slogan. For a long time, the CCP used the number of slogans posted as a criterion to assess one’s political achievements. During the Cultural Revolution, Beijing became a “red sea” of posters overnight, with the slogan “Down with the ruling capitalists in the Party” everywhere. In the countryside, ironically, the signs were shortened to “Down with the ruling party.”
Recently, to promote the Forest Law, the State Bureau of Forestry and all its stations and forest protection offices strictly ordered a standard amount of slogans to be put out. Not reaching the quota would be treated as not accomplishing the task. As a result, local government offices posted a large number of slogans, including “Whoever burns the mountains goes to prison.” In the administration of birth control in recent years, there have been even scarier slogans such as, “If one person violates the law, the whole village will be sterilized,” “Rather another tomb than another baby,” or, “If he did not have a vasectomy as he should, his house will be torn down; if she did not have an abortion as she should, her cows and rice fields will be confiscated.” There were more slogans that violate human rights and the Constitution, such as “You will sleep in prison tomorrow if you don’t pay taxes today.”
A slogan is basically a way of advertising, but in a more straightforward and repetitive manner. Hence, the Chinese government often uses slogans to promote political ideas, beliefs and positions. Political slogans can also be viewed as words the government speaks to its people. However, in the CCP’s policy-promoting slogans, it is not hard for one to sense the tendency of violence and cruelty.
VIII. BRAINWASH THE WHOLE COUNTRY AND TURN IT INTO A “MIND PRISON”
The most effective weapon the CCP uses to maintain its tyrannical rule is its system of control. In a well-organized fashion, the CCP imposes a mentality of obedience on every one of its citizens. Whether the Party contradicts itself or constantly changes policies doesn’t matter, so long as it can systematically organize a way to deprive people of their naturally endowed human rights. The government’s tentacles are omnipresent. Whether it is in rural or urban areas, citizens are governed by the so-called street or township committees. Until recently, getting married or divorced, and having a child all needed the approval of these committees. The Party’s ideology, way of thinking, organizations, social structure, propaganda mechanisms and administrative systems serve only its dictatorial purposes. The Party, through the systems of government, strives to control every individual’s thoughts and actions.
How brutally the CCP controls its people is not limited to the physical torture it inflicts. The Party also forces people to lose their ability to think independently, and makes them into fearful, self-protective cowards daring not to speak up. The goal of the CCP’s rule is to brainwash each of its citizens so that they think and talk like the CCP, and do what it promotes.
There is a saying that, “Party policy is like the moon, it changes every 15 days.” No matter how often the Party changes its policies, everyone in the nation needs to follow them closely. When you are used as a means of attacking others, you need to thank the Party for appreciating your strength; when you are hurt, you have to thank the CCP for “teaching you a lesson”; when you are wrongfully discriminated against and the CCP later gives you redress, you have to thank the CCP for being generous, open-minded and able to correct its mistakes. The CCP runs its tyranny through continuous cycles of suppression followed by redress.
After 55 years of tyranny, the CCP has imprisoned the nation’s mind and enclosed it within the range allowed by the CCP. For someone to think outside this boundary is considered a crime. After repeated struggles, stupidity is praised as wisdom; being a coward is the way to survive. In a modern society with the Internet as the mainstream of information exchange, the CCP even asks its people to exercise self-discipline and not read news from outside or log onto websites with keywords like “human rights” and “democracy.”
The CCP’s movement to brainwash its people is absurd, brutal, and despicable, yet ubiquitous. It has distorted the moral values and principles of Chinese society and completely rewritten the nation’s behavioral standards and lifestyle. The CCP continuously uses mental and physical torture to strengthen its absolute authority to rule China with the all-encompassing “CCP religion.”
CONCLUSION
Why does the CCP have to fight incessantly to keep its power? Why does the CCP believe that as long as life exists, strife is endless? To achieve its goal, the CCP does not hesitate to murder people or to destroy the ecological environment, nor does the CCP care that the majority of farmers and many urban citizens are living in poverty.
Is it for the ideology of Communism that the CCP goes through an endless strife? The answer is “No.” One of the principles of the Communist Party is to get rid of private ownership, which the CCP tried to do when it came to power. The CCP believed that private ownership was the root cause of all evil. However, after the economic reform in the 1980s, private ownership was allowed again in China and protected by the Constitution. Piercing through the CCP’s lies, people will see clearly that in its 55 years of rule, the CCP merely stage-managed a drama of property redistribution. After several rounds of such distribution, the CCP simply converted the capital of others into its own private property.
The CCP claims itself to be the “pioneer of the working class.” Its task is to eliminate the capitalist class. However, the CCP bylaws now unequivocally allow capitalists to join the Party. Members of the CCP no longer believe in the Party and Communism, and the CCP’s existence is unjustifiable. What is left of the Communist Party is only a shell void of its alleged content.
Was the long-term struggle to keep the CCP members free from corruption? No. 55 years after the CCP has been in power, corruption, embezzlement, unlawful conduct, and acts that damage the nation and the people are still widespread among the CCP officials throughout the country. In recent years, among the total number of approximately 20 million party officials in China, eight million have been tried and punished for crimes related to corruption. Each year, about one million people complain to higher authorities about the corrupt officials who have not been investigated. From January to September of 2004, the China Foreign Exchange Bureau investigated cases of illegal foreign exchange clearance in 35 banks and 41 companies, and found US$120 million in illegal transactions. According to statistics in recent years, no less than 4,000 CCP officials have escaped China with embezzled money, and their stolen funds from the state add up to tens of billions of U.S dollars.
Were the struggles aiming to improve people’s education and consciousness and keep them interested in national affairs? The answer is another resounding “No.” In today’s China, materialistic pursuits are rampant, and people are losing the traditional virtue of honesty. It has become common for people to deceive relatives and swindle friends. About many important issues such as human rights or the persecution of Falun Gong, many Chinese either are unconcerned or refuse to speak. Keeping one’s thoughts to oneself and choosing not to speak the truth have become a basic survival skill in China. In the meantime, the CCP has repeatedly excited the public sentiment of nationalism on opportune occasions. The CCP may, for example, organize Chinese people to throw rocks at the US embassy and burn US flags. The Chinese people have been treated as either an obedient mass or a violent mob, but never citizens with guaranteed human rights. Cultural improvement is the basis for raising the consciousness of the people. The moral principles of Confucius and Mencius have, for thousands of years, established moral standards and principles. “If all these [moral] principles are abandoned, then people would have no laws to follow and discern no good and evil. They would lose their directions…the Tao would be destroyed.” [9]
The purpose of the CCP’s class struggle is continuously to generate chaos, through which it can firmly establish itself as the one and only ruling party and religion in China, using the party’s ideology to control the Chinese people. Government institutions, the military, and news media are all tools used by the CCP to exercise its violent dictatorship. The CCP, having brought incurable diseases to China, is itself on the edge of demise, and its collapse is inevitable.
Some people worry that the country will be in chaos if the CCP falls apart. Who will replace the CCP’s role in governing China? In China’s 5,000-year history, a mere 55 years ruled by the CCP is as short as a fleeting cloud. Unfortunately, however, during this short period of 55 years, the CCP has shattered traditional beliefs and standards; destroyed the traditional moral principles and social structures; turned caring and love among human beings into struggle and hatred; and replaced the reverence for heaven, the earth and nature with the arrogance of “humans conquering nature.” With one act of destruction after another the Party has ravaged the social, moral and ecological systems, leaving the Chinese nation in deep crisis.
In Chinese history, every benevolent leader viewed loving, nourishing, and educating the people as the duties of government. Human nature aspires to kindness, and the government’s role is to bring about this innate human capacity. Mencius said, “This is the way of the people: those with constant means of support will have constant hearts, while those without constant means will not have constant hearts.” [10] Education without prosperity has been ineffective; the tyrannical leaders who have had no love for the people but who have killed the innocent have been despised by the Chinese people.
In the 5,000 years of Chinese history, there have been many benevolent leaders, such as Emperor Yao and Emperor Shun in ancient times, Emperor Wen and Emperor Wu of the Zhou Dynasty, Emperor Wen and Emperor Jing in the Han Dynasty, Emperor Tang Taizong in the Tang Dynasty, and Emperor Kangxi and Emperor Qianlong in the Qing Dynasty. The prosperity enjoyed in these dynasties was all a result of the leaders practicing the heavenly Tao, following the doctrine of the mean, and striving for peace and stability. The characteristics of a kind leader are to make use of virtuous and capable people, be open to different opinions, promote justice and peace, and give the people what they need. This way, citizens will obey the laws, maintain a sense of decorum, live happily and work efficiently.
Looking at world affairs, we often ask who determines whether a state will prosper or disappear, even though we know that the rise and fall of a nation has its reasons. When the CCP is gone, we can expect that peace and harmony will return to China. People will return to being truthful, benevolent, humble, and tolerant, and the nation will again care for the people’s basic needs, and all professions will prosper.
NOTES:
[1] From the “Annals of Foods and Commodities” in History of the Former Han Dynasty (Han Shu). “All under heaven” refers to China under the emperors.
[2] Qian Bocheng, Oriental Culture, fourth edition, 2000.
[3] Gao Gang and Rao Shushi were both members of the Central Committee. After an unsuccessful bid in a power struggle in 1954, they were accused of plotting to split the Party and were subsequently expelled from the Party. Hu Feng, scholar and literary critic, opposed the sterile literature policy of the CCP. He was expelled from the Party in 1955 and sentenced to 14 years in prison. From 1951 to 1952, the CCP initiated the “Three Anti Campaign" and the "Five Anti Campaign,” movements with the stated goal of eliminating corruption, waste and bureaucracy within the Party, government, army and mass organizations.
[4] Lu Xun or Lu Hsün (September 25, 1881 – October 19, 1936) is often considered the founder of modern vernacular (Baihua) Chinese literature. He was also a noted translator. As a left-wing writer, Lu played an important role in the history of Chinese literature. His books greatly influenced many Chinese youth. Having returned to China from medical studies in Sendai, Japan in 1909, he became a lecturer in the Peking University and began writing.
[5] Both Jade Emperor and Dragon King are Chinese mythological figures. The Jade Emperor, known formally as the August Personage of Jade and called informally by children and commoners as Grandpa Heaven, is the ruler of Heaven and among the most important gods of the Chinese Daoist pantheon. Dragon King is the divine ruler of the four seas. Each sea, corresponding to one of the cardinal directions, is ruled by one Dragon King. The Dragon Kings live in crystal palaces, guarded by shrimp soldiers and crab generals. Besides ruling over the aquatic life, the Dragon Kings also manipulate clouds and rain. The Dragon King of the Eastern Sea is said to have the largest territory.
[6] Peng Dehuai (1898-1974): Communist Chinese general and political leader. Peng was the chief commander in the Korean War, vice-premier of the State Council, Politburo member, and Minister of Defense from 1954-1959. He was removed from his official posts after disagreeing with Mao’s Leftist approaches at the CCP’s Lushan Plenum in 1959.
[7] Zhao Gao (birth date unknown, died 210 BC): Chief eunuch during the Qin Dynasty. In 210 B.C., after Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s death, Zhao Gao, Prime Minister Li Si and the emperor’s second son Hu Hai forged two wills of the Emperor, making Hu Hai the new emperor and ordering Crown Prince Fu Su to commit suicide. Later, conflicts grew between Zhao Gao and Hu Hai. Zhao brought in a deer to the royal court and said it was a horse. Only a handful of the officials dared to disagree and say it was a deer. Zhao Gao believed those officials who called the animal a deer were against him and removed them from their court positions.
[8] Daxing Massacre occurred in August 1966 during the change of the Party leadership in Beijing. At that time, Xie Fuzhi, the Minister of Public Security, made a speech at a meeting with the Public Security Bureau of Beijing, encouraging no intervention with the Red Guards’ actions against the “five black classes.” This speech was soon relayed to a Standing Committee meeting of the Daxin Public Security Bureau. After the meeting, the Daxin Public Security Bureau immediately took action and formed a plan to incite the masses in Daxin County to kill the “five black classes.”
[9] From Kang Youwei, Collections of Political Writings (1981). Zhonghua Zhuju. Kang Youwei (1858-1927) was an important reform thinker of the Late Qing period.
[10] From Mencius.
