PureInsight | December 20, 2004
The Tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party
Foreword
When thinking of tyranny, most Chinese people recall Qin Shi Huang (259-210 B.C.), the first Emperor of the Qin Dynasty, whose oppressive government burned books on philosophy 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 draconian laws; 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 10 million; the emperor drafted over 2 million to perform forced labor. Qin Shi Huang brought his draconian 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. Most people know that the CCP's philosophy is one of "struggle." Mao Zedong, the first CCP leader since the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), put it bluntly by saying, "What Qin Shi Huang did was no big deal. He buried 460 intellectuals alive, but we buried 46,000. There are people who label Qin Shi Huang and us as a dictatorship, and we accept them all. It's a fact." [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 the policy of revolution through violence. Killing and brainwashing have been used hand in hand to suppress all beliefs differing from communist theory. The CCP has launched one movement after another to portray itself as infallible and godlike. Following its policies of class struggle and violent revolution, the CCP has tried to purge dissidents and opposing social classes, using violence and tricks 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 the 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 farmers, encouraged them to take property by violence and to disregard the moral implications of their actions; it even instigated the landless farmers to fight those farmers who owned land. The campaign, which explicitly stipulated eliminating the landlord class, began with grouping the rural population into different social categories. Twenty million rural inhabitants nationwide were labeled as "landlords, rich farmers, reactionaries, or bad elements." These new outcasts faced discrimination, humiliation, and loss of all their civil rights. As the land reform program extended its reach to remote areas and the villages of ethnic minorities, the CCP's organizations also expanded quickly. Party committees and branches spread all over China and were built at the village and township levels. 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 farmers to rise up against their landlords. Nearly 100,000 landlords died during this movement. In certain areas the CCP and the farmers 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 with little effort. Poor farmers 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, elementary communes, advanced communes, 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, farmers to "dash" into socialism. With grain, cotton, and cooking oil placed under a unified purchasing and selling system nationwide, the major agricultural products were excluded from market exchange. In addition, the CCP established a residential registration system, barring farmers from going to the cities to find work or dwell. Those who registered their residence in rural areas were not allowed to buy grain at state-run stores and their children were prohibited from receiving education in cities. Farmers' children could only be farmers, 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 system of communal living to a household contract system, farmers' income increased slightly and their social status improved somewhat. However, such a meager benefit was soon lost due to corrupt rural officials and a price imbalance between agricultural and industrial commodities. As a result, today's 900 million farmers have once again fallen into dire poverty, while the rest of China has achieved better living standards through the nation's economic reforms. The income gap between the urban and rural population has drastically increased and continues to widen. New landlords and wealthy farmers have emerged to replace those eliminated in the land reform program. Data provided by the Xinhua News Agency, a government mouthpiece, indicated that since 1997, "The income of farmers in the major grain production areas and that of most rural households have been at a standstill and, in some cases, has experienced a decline." 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
The native capitalist class, a class of people who owned capital investments and resided in cities and towns, was also bound to face destruction during the CCP's rule. 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 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. Capitalists could thrive if they went along with the government, but would perish if they didn't. 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 did we have today?" referring to the number of capitalists that had committed suicide by jumping from the tops of buildings that day. This was how the CCP quickly eliminated private ownership in China.
While carrying out its land and business reform programs, the CCP launched many massive movements that persecuted the Chinese people. These movements included: the suppression of "counter-revolutionaries," ideological remolding campaigns, cleansing the anti-CCP clique headed by Gao Gang and Rao Shushi, and probing Hu Feng's [3] "counter-revolutionary" group. From 1951 to 1952, the CCP initiated movements called the "Three Anti Campaign" and the "Five Anti Campaign" with the stated goal of eliminating corruption, waste and bureaucracy within the Party, government, army and mass organizations. In reality, however, the CCP used these movements to target and brutally persecute countless innocent people.
Having a full control of government resources, the CCP fully utilized them in conjunction with the Party's committees, branches, and sub-branches in every single political movement. Three party members would form a small struggle force, infiltrating all villages and neighborhoods. These struggle forces were ubiquitous, leaving no stone unturned. This deeply-rooted control network, inherited from the CCP's years of war with Japan and the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party, KMT), has since played a key role in later political movements, including the suppression of its people today.
III. Crackdown on Religions and Popular Groups
Another atrocity the CCP committed is the brutal suppression of religion and complete ban of all non-governmental 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, making them the enemy of the CCP. In this 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, and Buddhists. They ordered all members of these churches, temples, and religious factions to register with government agencies and to repent for their unofficial activities. Failure to do so would mean severe punishment. In 1951, the government formally promulgated regulations threatening that those who continued their activities in unofficial 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, including death penalty, at least three million religious believers and underground group members. The CCP searched almost every household across the nation and interrogated its members, even smashing statues of the Kitchen God that Chinese farmers 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 national 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 bottom line is, 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 become the target of the CCP's crackdown and dictatorship.
Twenty thousand Christians conducted a survey among 560,000 Christians in house churches at 207 cities in 22 provinces in China. The survey found that among house church attendees, 130,000 were under government surveillance. 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 was critical of the Hungarian government and participated in forums and debates. The group sparked a nationwide revolution in Hungary, which was crushed by Soviet solders. Mao Zedong took this as a lesson. In 1957, Mao called upon the Chinese intellectuals and other non-communists 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." His purpose was to lure out "anti-Party elements among people." In his letter to provincial Party chiefs in 1957, Mao Zedong spoke his intention of "leading the snakes out of their holes" by letting them air their views freely in helping the CCP rectify itself.
Slogans at the time encouraged people to speak up and promised no reprisals—the Party "won't pick pigtails, won't strike with a bat, won't put on a hat, and never settle an account afterwards." [4] Yet later 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 government jobs and 230,000 were labeled as "medium rightists" or "anti-socialist elements." Mao Zedong's political tricks in persecuting people included: duping those with dissenting views into speaking up; fabricating crimes; sentencing people without any due legal procedure; and claiming to be saving people, while actually relentlessly attacking people.
What then were the "reactionary words" 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 across the nation to assign a CCP member 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 (1881-1936), "My master, your gown has become dirty. Please take it off and I will wash it for you." Like Lu Xun, their words 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. What followed were additional movements such as "confiding to the CCP," digging out the hardliners, the movement of the "Three New Anti," 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 would be labeled as being anti-CCP. The CCP would often subject them to constant criticism or send them to a labor camp for forced reeducation. Sometimes the party relocated whole families to rural areas, or barred their children from going to college or joining the army. They couldn't apply for jobs in the county that they lived in. The families would lose their job security and public health benefits. They had been enrolled in the ranks of farmers and become 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 just distanced themselves from political matters. Chinese intellectuals, who are supposed to have a 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 began to fear objective reality. Everyone was involved in listening to falsehoods, telling falsehoods, making up false stories, and avoiding and covering up the truth through lies and rumors. The Great Leap Forward was a nationwide lie-telling exercise. 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 minds of the intellectuals. At the time, many people sang the song promoting the Great Leap Forward, "I am the Great Jade Emperor, I am the Dragon King, I can move the mountains and rivers, here I come." Policies such as "achieving a grain production throughout of 75,000 kg per hectare," "doubling steel production," and "surpassing Britain in 10 years and the US in 15 years" were carried out year after year. These policies resulted in a great, nationwide famine that cost millions of lives.
During the Lushan Plenum in 1959, all the participants felt that General Peng Dehuai's [5] opinion was correct and that the Great Leap Forward initiated by Mao Zedong was foolish. However, no one dared to say anything. The decision to support Mao's policy or not marked the line between being loyal or a traitor, in other words, the line between life and death. In ancient history, when Zhao Gao [6] claimed that a deer was a horse, he knew the difference between a deer and a horse, but he made the mistake purposefully to test and control public opinion. 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 Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping was forced to guarantee that he would never appeal against the government's decision to remove him from his posts.
People normally learn from past lessons and experiences. However, the CCP has censored the media, keeping people from having the chance to learn lessons from the Chinese government's policy mistakes. This has affected people's minds, diminishing their ability to think critically. During past movements, each generation heard only the Party's point of view and had no idea about opposing schools of thought. As a result, new movements were judged based on a very limited knowledge of history. The CCP has relied on censorship to keep people ignorant so as to carry out its often violent ideology.
VI. The Cultural Revolution – Turning the World Upside Down
One cannot discuss the possession of China by the evil specter of the CCP without bringing up the Great Cultural Revolution. In 1966, a new wave of violence occurred in China; the red terror ran out of control and covered every corner of the country. Writer Qin Mu described the Cultural Revolution in bleak terms:
It was truly an unmitigated disaster: [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 Great Cultural Revolution happened mostly during the rebel movements, and that it was the Red Guards and Rebels who committed the slaughter. 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 military weapons, but rather in 1968 when Mao regained control over the country through levels of "revolutionary committees." 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 Chinese government, not the irregular, extreme behavior of the Red Guards. The CCP has covered up its own direct involvement in the campaign and the instructions given by party leaders and government officials.
In August of 1966, the Red Guards expelled Beijing residents who had been classified in past movements as "landlords, wealthy farmers, reactionaries, bad elements, and rightists" out of the city into the countryside. Incomplete official statistics showed that 33,695 homes were searched and 85,196 Beijing residents were expelled from the city to the countryside where their older generations had originally come from. Red Guards all over the country carried out this policy, 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 political classification (that is, they or their parents were labeled as "landlords, wealthy farmers, reactionaries, bad elements, and rightists") would be expelled out of the city. In May of 1966, Mao commanded his subordinates to "protect the capital" and to set up a capital working team, 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 with a bad political classification.
This background 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. The Red Guard organizations were set up under the direct instruction of some party leaders. Many notices issued by the Red Guards were revised and published by the State Council. However, despite the previous support for the Red Guards, at the end of 1966 the CCP labeled many of them as counterrevolutionaries and imprisoned them.
Following the removal of the Beijing residents with a bad political classification to the countryside, these individuals then faced increasing persecution in the countryside. On August 26, 1966, a speech of Xie Fuzhi was passed down to the Daxing Police Bureau. Xie ordered the police to assist the Red Guards in the searching homes of the "five black classes" by providing advice and information and helping in their raids.
The infamous Daxing Massacre [7] started directly from the instructions of the police department; 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 the slaughter. According to incomplete statistics for Guangxi province, about 50,000 CCP members were involved in the slaughter. Among them more than 9,000 were admitted into the Party within a short period of time after killing someone. More than 20,000 committed murder after being admitted into the Party, and more than 19,000 other Party members were related to killing one way or another.
During the Great 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. 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 as a result of thinking 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 "five black classes." The slaughter lasted 66 days; more than 4,519 people in 2,778 households were killed in 468 divisions of 36 people's communes in 10 districts. A total of 9,093 people were killed in the area, of which 38% were of the "five black classes" and 44% were the children of the "five black classes." The oldest person killed was 78 years old, and the youngest was only 10 days old.
This is only one case in one small area during the Cultural Revolution. In Inner Mongolia, after the establishment of the "revolutionary committee" in early 1968, a class-purging movement against the "Inner People's Party" killed more than 350,000 people. In 1968, tens of thousands of people in Guangxi province participated in the mass slaughtering of the "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 utilized and allowed violence to persecute and kill citizens.
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-Rightists Movement the CCP eliminated all intellectuals who held opposing opinions, then this kind of fighting amongst the people during the Cultural Revolution shows that no one class could be relied upon. Even if you were from the working class or were a peasant used by the Party, 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, all-encompassing, absolute controlling religion over the country, controlling not just bodies but minds.
The Cultural Revolution pushed the CCP and Mao Zedong's cult of personality to a climax. Mao's theory had to be used to dominate everything and one person's vision had to be embedded in tens of millions of people's minds. What's unique about the Great Cultural Revolution was that it purposely didn't specify what could not be done. Instead, it emphasized on "what can be done and how to do it. Anything outside this boundary cannot be done or even considered."
During the Cultural Revolution, everyone in the country carried out a religious-like ritual: "ask for instructions in the morning and make reports at night." Every day: send greetings of respect to Chairman Mao several times, wishing him boundless longevity. Nearly every literate person had the experience of writing self-criticizing statements and thought reports. Mao's quotations such as "fighting ferociously against every single thought of selfishness," and "execute instructions whether their objective is understood or not, understand them further in the process of execution" were frequently repeated.
Only one "god" (Mao) was allowed to be worshiped; only one kind of scripture (Mao's teaching) was allowed to be studied. Soon it developed to the stage 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 irrelevant. In doing these things, people were either fanatical or cynical, and everyone was already under the control of the communist evil specter. Lying, tolerating lies and relying on lies became part of Chinese people's lives.
VII. The Economic Reform Era – The Violence Never Changed
The Cultural Revolution was a period full of blood, killings, grievances, loss of a sense of right and wrong, and turning black and white upside down. After the Cultural Revolution, the top position was like a revolving door, when the CCP and its government changed six leaders within 20 years. Private ownership returned to China, disparities in the standard of living between cities and rural areas widened, the desert area increased dramatically, rivers disappeared, and drugs and prostitution increased. All the "crimes" the CCP fought against were 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. The political power of the Chinese government is still based on the CCP's philosophy of struggles and promoting violence. It has only become more deceptive.
Law Making: The CCP has never stopped creating conflicts among people. They have sentenced large numbers of citizens charged with 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 "social stability," the Party has kept changing constitutions, laws and regulations, and has persecuted as reactionaries anyone who disagreed 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 enveloped the country again. After Jiang Zemin in an interview with a French media Le Monde denounced Falun Gong as an "evil cult," Chinese propagandists followed up by quickly publishing articles pressuring everyone in the country to turn against Falun Gong. Finally, the National People's Congress was coerced into passing a non-descript "decision" dealing with evil cults; soon after that 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 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: anyone who admitted to practicing Falun Gong and who refused to give up the practice would lose their jobs and be sentenced to forced labor. The Falun Gong practitioners did not commit any wrongdoing, did not betray the country nor go against the government; they only believed in "Truth, Compassion, Forbearance." Yet hundreds of thousands were imprisoned. Even though information is heavily blocked, more than 1,100 people have been confirmed by their families to have been tortured to death, and the numbers of unconfirmed deaths are even 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 Sichuan province's Dayin county. The report quoted Dayin county government office director Ai Yuqing saying that the "black lump" was confirmed to be the satellite. Ai was also the on-site deputy director of the returning satellite control project. However, Xinhua News reported the satellite's time of return, emphasizing that this was the 20th scientific and technical experimental satellite to return to China. Xinhua did not mention anything about the satellite destroying a house. This is a typical example of the Chinese news media's common practice of reporting good news and covering up bad news under the Party's instructions.
Lies and slander published by newspapers and broadcast on television have greatly assisted the execution of the CCP's policies in all of the past political movements. At the Party's command, all of the media in the country would report whatever the Party wanted them to report. When the Party wants to start an Anti-Rightist Movement, media all over the country would report the crimes of rightists. When the Party wanted to set up people's communes, the whole nation started to praise the virtues of people's communes. Within the first month of the persecution against Falun Gong, all media slandered Falun Gong repeatedly during prime time in order to brainwash people. Since then, Jiang has utilized all media to make and spread repetitive lies and slander about Falun Gong. This includes the effort to incite national 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 United Nations International Educational Development in Geneva as a government-staged action to deceive people. In the past five years, no mainland Chinese newspaper or TV station has reported a single true fact 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. There is a folk song: "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 how 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 who have both knowledge and correct judgment. Knowledge refers to the understanding of information, materials and historical events; judgment refers to the process of research and the ability to analyze and recreate such knowledge, in the process encouraging mental and spiritual development. Those who have knowledge without the support of judgment are referred to as bookworms. Intellectuals with righteous judgment were always viewed as the society's conscience in Chinese history. However, under the CCP's control, Chinese intellectuals with knowledge but no judgment or with knowledge but who dare not exercise their own judgment can be found everywhere.
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 had 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 entrance exams for colleges and high schools. Students who do not know the model answers do not get high scores and lose the chance to enter good colleges or high schools. If a student dares to tell the truth, he will be expelled out of school immediately and lose any chance of being educated.
In the public education system, due to the influence of the newspapers and documents, many well known proverbs such as "We embrace whatever our enemy objects to; we object to whatever our enemy embraces" are taken as the truth. The negative effect is widespread: it has poisoned people's hearts, supplanting benevolence and destroying the virtue of living in peace and harmony.
In 2004, the China Information Center analyzed a survey done by the China Sina Net with statistics showing 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 benevolent governance and humanity.
On Sep 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 an assessment of one's political contributions. During the Cultural Revolution, Beijing became a "red sea" full of banners overnight. Signs of "Down with the ruling capitalists in the Party" were everywhere. In the countryside, ironically, the signs were shortened to "Down with the ruling party."
Recently, to promote the Forest Protection Law, the Bureau of Forestry and all its stations and forest protection offices strictly ordered a standard amount of slogans to be put out. If the quota was not reached, it would be considered not accomplishing the task. As a result, low-level government offices posted a large number of slogans like, "Whoever burns the mountains goes to prison." In recent birth control projects, there were 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, we'll tear down his house; if she did not have an abortion as she should, we'll confiscate her cows and rice fields." There were even slogans that were against human rights and the Constitution like, "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 as a way to promote political ideas, values and positions. Political slogans can also be viewed as words the government speaks to its people. However, in these slogans announcing policies, it's not hard to smell the violence and cruelty.
VIII. Brainwash the Whole Country and Turn It into a "Mind Prison"
The most lethal weapon the CCP uses to maintain its tyrannical rule is its controlling network. In a well organized fashion, the CCP imposes an obedience mentality on every one of its citizens. It doesn't matter if it contradicts itself or constantly changes policies as long as it can systematically organize a way to deprive people of their basic human rights. The government's tentacles are omnipresent. Whether it's in rural or urban areas, citizens are governed by the so-called street or township committees. Getting married or divorced, and having a child all need the approval of these committees. The Party's ideology, way of thinking, organizations, social infrastructure, 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.
The manifestation of how brutally the CCP controls its people is not only limited to the physical torture it inflicts. It also forces people to lose their ability to think independently, and makes them fearful of speaking out. The goal of the CCP's ruling is to brainwash its own citizens and have them 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 hurting 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 fault. 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 in the range allowed by the CCP. For someone to think outside the box is considered a crime. After many criticisms and interrogations, 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. The CCP has distorted the moral values and principles of Chinese society and completely rewritten the nation's behavioral standards and lifestyle. It continuously uses mental and physical torture methods to strengthen its dictatorship and become the absolute authority in the all-encompassing "CCP religion."
Conclusion
Why does the CCP have to fight constantly 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 commit murder or to destroy the ecology, 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 it 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 falsity, people will see clearly that in its 55 years of rule, the CCP merely stage-managed a drama of property redistribution. After a few cycles 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. 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. Fifty five 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 appeal to report on 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, numerous government officials have embezzled and stolen funds totaling hundreds of millions 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 virtues of honesty. It has become a norm 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. According to Kang Youwei (1858-1927), an important reform thinker of the Late Qing period, the moral principles of Confucius and Mencius have, for thousands of years, established the basis for social order and state power. "If all these principles are abandoned, then people would have no laws to follow and discern no good and evil. They will loose their directions…the Tao would be destroyed." [8]
The purpose of the CCP's class struggle is to continuously generate chaos, through which it can firmly establish itself as the one and only ruling party 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 maintain its 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 to govern 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 time, the CCP has shattered Chinese traditional beliefs and values; destroyed the traditional moral principles and social structures; turned caring and love among human beings into criticism and hatred; replaced the reverence for heaven and the earth with the arrogance of "humans conquering nature." These destructions have ravaged the social, moral and ecological systems, leaving China in a deep crisis.
In Chinese history, every benevolent leader viewed loving, nourishing, and educating the people as the duties of the 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." [9] Education without prosperity has been ineffective; the tyrannical leaders who had no love for the people but who 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 a result of the government practicing the heavenly Tao, following the doctrine of the mean, and striving for peace and harmony. 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) .
[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, was opposed to the sterile literature policy of the CCP. He was expelled from the Party in 1955 and sentenced to 14 years in prison.
[4] "Picking pigtails" means to nit-pick on one's shortcomings; "striking with a bat" means to punish physically or mentally; "putting on a hat" means to put on a negative label; "settling an account afterwards" means to retaliate at a later time.
[5] 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.
[6] Zhao Gao (born 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 ordered 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 these officials were against him and removed them from the government.
[7] Daxing Massacre occurred in August 1966 during the change of the Party leadership of of Beijing. At that time, a speech was made by the Minister of Public Security, Xie Fuzhi, in a meeting with the Public Security Bureau of Beijing regarding no intervention with the Red Guards' actions against the "black five classes." Such a 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 "dark five classes.
[8] From Kang Youwei, "Collections of political writings" 1981. Zhonghua Zhuju.
[9] From Mencius.
Reprinted from: http://english.epochtimes.com/news/4-12-13/24939.html
