Celebrating the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China on Tuesday, the Chinese showcased their military might with a parade through Tiananmen Square.
Anyone who’s familiar with 20th century history would probably agree that the communist takeover of that country is something that’s more appropriately commemorated with mourning than celebrating. Mao Zedong’s legacy is a very bitter one, he’s probably responsible for more deaths than Stalin and Hitler combined. Here’s a brief recap of the horrors (in case your public school books left them out) ~
According to the authoritative “Black Book of Communism,” an estimated 65 million Chinese died as a result of Mao’s repeated, merciless attempts to create a new “socialist” China. Anyone who got in his way was done away with — by execution, imprisonment or forced famine.
For Mao, the No. 1 enemy was the intellectual. The so-called Great Helmsman reveled in his blood-letting, boasting, “What’s so unusual about Emperor Shih Huang of the China Dynasty? He had buried alive 460 scholars only, but we have buried alive 46,000 scholars.” Mao was referring to a major “accomplishment” of the Great Cultural Revolution, which from 1966-1976 transformed China into a great House of Fear.
The most inhumane example of Mao’s contempt for human life came when he ordered the collectivization of China’s agriculture under the ironic slogan, the “Great Leap Forward.” A deadly combination of lies about grain production, disastrous farming methods (profitable tea plantations, for example, were turned into rice fields), and misdistribution of food produced the worse famine in human history.
Deaths from hunger reached more than 50 percent in some Chinese villages. The total number of dead from 1959 to 1961 was between 30 million and 40 million — the population of California.
Only five years later, when he sensed that revolutionary fervor in China was waning, Mao proclaimed the Cultural Revolution. Gangs of Red Guards — young men and women between 14 and 21 — roamed the cities targeting revisionists and other enemies of the state, especially teachers.
Professors were dressed in grotesque clothes and dunce caps, their faces smeared with ink. They were then forced to get down on all fours and bark like dogs. Some were beaten to death, some even eaten — all for the promulgation of Maoism. A reluctant Mao finally called in the Red Army to put down the marauding Red Guards when they began attacking Communist Party members, but not before 1 million Chinese died.
All the while, Mao kept expanding the laogai, a system of 1,000 forced labor camps throughout China. Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in labor camps, has estimated that from the 1950s through the 1980s, 50 million Chinese passed through the Chinese version of the Soviet gulag. Twenty million died as a result of the primitive living conditions and 14-hour work days.
And yet ironically, as Lee Edwards, Ph.D. points out, Mao Zedong remains the most honored figure in the Chinese Communist Party. Which certainly speaks to the success of relentless totalitarian indoctrination.
For the last couple of decades, the West has been duped into believing China was no longer a threat to world stability. The country was incorporating some limited aspects of capitalism into their economy. Their record on human rights seemed to be improving, and miraculously Christianity was suddenly growing throughout the country.
Unfortunately it was only a brief respite from tyranny. In the last two years or so, China’s communist tendencies, which it turns out had only been temporarily suppressed – are back with a vengeance. In the last 12 months, the headlines have grown increasingly alarming ~
China’s Persecution Of Christians On The Rise (So stop siding with them in Trade War) ~ From Charles Payne (financial reporter) ~
China’s crackdown on religion is on the rise from ransacking and intimidating Christian churches to imprisoning one million Muslims. Moreover, the government has begun employing surveillance cameras, big data and artificial intelligence to monitor Muslims to determine if they might have an inclination of independent thought.
We used to care about this kind of persecution.
President Xi Jinping considers Christians one of the greatest threats to his power. Underground churches are listed as one of the “new black five” national security threats in China. It’s new under this president for churches to be classified as a national security threat […]
On February 1 of this year, a new law called “Regulations on the Administration of Religious Affairs” took effect. Things have become dramatically even worse. Bible-burning campaigns are happening across China.
China Demolishes Crosses, Mandates Surveillance in Churches as Religious Persecution Rises ~
In recent months, China’s systematic suppression and persecution of religious minorities have made headlines worldwide. Reporting from Pew Research Center, NPR and the Associated Press reveals widespread surveillance of believers and the destruction of their churches. Christians are being arrested and even tortured for the faith.
Despite Vatican-China agreement, police kidnap bishop to undergo government indoctrination ~
The bishop who has been a member of the underground Church – faithful to the Holy See during decades of communist government persecution – will be “coerced to submit to the religious policy of China, which requires registration with the government and membership of the Patriotic Association (PA),” according to Asia News, which first broke the story.
Communists cannot abide Christianity. Why? Because Christians ultimately answer to a higher authority – not to the state. But they aren’t the only victims of Chinese persecution these days.
China must believe that the Uygur population (Chinese Muslims in the northwestern area of the country) represent an even bigger threat. Or at least for now they’re easier to oppress ~ China’s Han Superstate: The New Third Reich (NOT an exaggeration!) ~
China’s ruler, Xi Jinping, demands that the five recognized religions — official recognition is a control mechanism — “Sinicize.” The Chinese, as a part of this ruthless and relentless effort, are destroying mosques and churches, forcing devout Muslims to drink alcohol and eat pork, inserting Han officials to live in Muslim homes, and ending religious instruction for minors […]
More than a million people, for no reason other than their ethnicity or religion, are held in concentration camps in what Beijing calls the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and what traditional inhabitants of the area, the Uighurs, say is East Turkestan. In addition to Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs are also held in these facilities.
Families in this troubled area, shown on maps as the northwestern portion of the People’s Republic of China, are being torn apart. The children of imprisoned Uighur and Kazakh parents are “confined” to “schools” that are separated from the outside by barbed wire and heavy police patrols. They are denied instruction in their own language, forced to learn Mandarin Chinese. The controls are part of a so-called “Hanification” policy, a program of forced assimilation. “Han” is the name of China’s dominant ethnic group.
Because Uighurs and Kazakhs are dying in the camps in considerable numbers, Beijing is building crematoria to eradicate burial traditions while disposing of corpses.
The camps, a crime against humanity, are spreading. China is now building similar facilities, given various euphemistic names such as “vocational training centers,” in Tibet, in China’s southwest.
China’s Forced Sterilization of Uighur Women Is Cultural Genocide ~ Horrifying ~
Uighur women testify to the horrors they have endured, including new reports of forced sterilization. One Uighur woman interviewed by French television said she was constantly injected with a substance during her detention that stopped her periods.
BBC Report Shows Disturbing Nature of China’s ‘Thought Transformation’ Camps ~
(The BBC reporter spoke) to Chinese officials. Nearly every one alludes to the notion that the roughly 800,000 to 1 million people interned in Xinjiang are affected by religious extremism and in need of reeducation so that their thinking aligns with the Chinese Communist Party.
In addition to “thought transformation,” people in these facilities must undergo Mandarin lessons, self-criticism sessions, forced labor, and even torture. Occasionally, there are deaths.
China’s rapid internment of potentially millions of Uighur Muslims is made possible by a draconian use of surveillance technology — the kind that China is already exporting across the globe to countries in Africa, Latin America, and Europe.
Dizzying advances in technology, unavailable to Mao during his reign of terror, have allowed China to become a surveillance state on steroids. They’re alarmingly close to 1984 in 2019.
China Goes Digital In Crackdown On Religion, Online Religious Instructors Forced To Register And Qualify As ‘Politically Reliable’
Why the Crisis in Xinjiang Is About More Than Human Rights ~
China has deployed surveillance technology in Xinjiang to track the Muslim population’s every move. By reverse-engineering the IJOP application Chinese police use to track Uighurs, Human Rights Watch found that even innocuous actions like leaving one’s home via the back door rather than the front are deemed suspicious.
Now couple that terrifying vision of a police state with this latest horror ~ China Harvests Organs From ‘Prisoners of Conscience’ and Religious Minorities Including Christians, Tribunal Says ~
“Forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, including the religious minorities of Falun Gong and Uighurs, has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale,” (China Tribunal lawyer Hamid Sabi) said, according to a video published on the China Tribunal’s website.
Describing the organ-harvesting as “one of the worst mass atrocities of this century,” Sabi said there were “hundreds of thousands of victims.”
Isn’t communism great kids?
And all these troubling developments don’t even touch on China’s threatening behavior in Hong Kong, their trade manipulation, neo-colonial ambitions and menacing military actions (These last three are issues which Center for Security Policy has covered extensively).
So no, 70 years is not celebration-worthy. It’s condemnation-worthy.
70 years is more than enough totalitarian oppression, misery and death for the unfortunate people of China. Time for this tyranny to end.
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Related:
Why China’s National Day is not worth celebrating
Police shoot Hong Kong protester at close range ~ Same day China was celebrating their communist anniversary
Freedom Denied: Communist China’s Red Legacy
China’s Belt and Road Mirrors a Neo-colonization Campaign ~ “Belt and Road” is a series of various projects in developing countries, usually involving the development of infrastructure, financed by Chinese loans and executed by Chinese government owned entities ~
BRI has severe consequences, pummeling participating countries into debts impossible to pay back. Receiving countries are susceptible to China’s undue influence, where they bow to the wishes of Beijing. BRI is in effect is ‘Neo-Colonization,’ and is ever growing, with significant investments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America […]
In Africa, the BRI brings with it an influx of Chinese government owned organizations, which has proven to be a problem for African workers and business owners.
“It’s an apartheid system…with the Chinese at the top, then the whites, then the blacks, and at the very bottom are the Kenyans…We have to let the Chinese go first in the restrooms and we’re only allowed to eat in the cafeteria after 1 p.m., after they have eaten. They treat us like their inferiors,” anonymous employee of the Chinese government owned Chinese Global Television network (CGTN) in Kenya.
Gordon Chang: ‘China Is Not Safe for Foreigners’
The World’s War on Christendom – Latest Dispatch from the Front ~ (Nov. 16, 2018) China devolving into a police state to rival North Korea
Pope Francis throws Chinese Catholics under the bus – (Oct.11, 2018)
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Updated: 10-6-19
Added:
The Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China Is a Dark Day for Mankind ~ Indeed. And sometimes Trump’s “diplomacy” is sometimes wildly misplaced ~
This week, Donald Trump tweeted, “Congratulations to President Xi and the Chinese people on the 70th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China!” For diplomatic reasons, it’s become customary for American presidents to praise and commend this depraved totalitarian regime. In a just world, the president would be sending his sympathies to the Chinese people, who have endured inconceivable sufferings under the communist regime since 1949.
As Helen Raleigh, whose family experienced Maoist-driven deprivations, aptly noted, the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China marks one of the darkest days in Chinese history. It’s also one of the darkest days in mankind’s history. Of all the planned utopian economies of the 20th century, none was more deadly or dehumanizing. No government has murdered, tortured, imprisoned and terrorized more of its own people than communist China […]
The free capitalistic enclaves of Taiwan and Hong Kong would be constant reminders of both the amazing ingenuity of the Chinese people and the crimes of China’s government. Even today, the brave protesters in Hong Kong won’t relent to the communists’ arbitrary rule. They deserve more from us.
In an age in which some Americans act as if losing an election is tantamount to totalitarianism, the staggering death and poverty caused by the People’s Republic of China can be difficult to wrap one’s mind around. Reading the history of China’s regime, which is taking an excruciatingly long time to wind down, even as capitalism takes hold, is numbing in its unremitting inhumanity.
Is China the Country of the Future? ~ Pat Buchanan reviews the past, and ponders the future ~
(U)nder Xi Jinping, the mask of benign giant has slipped and the menacing face of 21st-century China is being revealed, for its people, its neighbors, and the world to see.
