Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party 九評共產黨

Foreword

For more than 5,000 years, the Chinese people created a splendid civilization on the land nurtured by the Yellow River and the Yangtze River. During this long period, dynasties came and went, and the Chinese culture waxed and waned. Grand and moving stories have played out on the historical stage of China. The year 1840, commonly considered by historians to be the beginning of China’s contemporary era, marked the start of China’s journey from tradition to modernization.

Chinese civilization experienced four major episodes of challenge and response. The first three episodes included the invasion of Beijing by the Anglo–French Allied Force in the early 1860s, the Sino–Japanese War in 1894 (also called the Jiawu War), and the Russo–Japanese War in China’s northeast in 1904–1905.

To these three episodes of challenge, China responded first with the Westernization Movement, which was marked by the importation of modern goods and weapons. Next were the institutional reforms in 1898 known as the Hundred Days’ Reform and the attempt at the end of the late Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) to establish constitutional rule. The third response, in 1911, was the Xinhai Revolution. [1]

At the end of World War I, China, though it emerged victorious, was not among the stronger powers at that time. Many Chinese people believed that the first three episodes of response had failed. The May Fourth Movement [2] would lead to the fourth attempt at responding to the previous challenges and would culminate in the complete westernization of Chinese culture through the communist movement and its extreme revolution.

This chapter concerns the outcomes of the last episode: the communist movement and the Communist Party. Let’s take a close look at the result of what China has chosen or, perhaps one can say, what has been imposed on China after generations of tumults, nearly 100 million unnatural deaths, and the destruction of nearly all Chinese traditional culture and civilization.

“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” [3] This quote is taken from the concluding paragraph of The Communist Manifesto, the principal guide for all communist movements. Violence is the primary means by which communist parties gained power. This character trait has been passed on to all subsequent forms of the Party that have arisen since its birth.

In fact, the world’s first communist party was established many years after Karl Marx’s death. In the year after the October Revolution in 1917, the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), later to be known as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was born. This party grew out of the use of violence against “class enemies” and was maintained through violence against party members and ordinary citizens. During Joseph Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, the Soviet communists slaughtered more than twenty million so-called spies and traitors, as well as those with dissenting opinions.

The CCP first started as a branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Third Communist International. Therefore, it naturally inherited a willingness to kill. During China’s first civil war between the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), [4] between 1927 and 1936, the population in Jiangxi Province dropped from more than twenty million to about ten million. The damage wrought by the CCP’s use of violence can be seen from these figures alone. Using violence may be unavoidable when attempting to seize political power, but there has never been a regime as eager to kill as the CCP, especially during otherwise peaceful periods. The number of deaths caused by the Party’s violence since 1949, when it emerged victorious the civil war against the Kuomintang and unified China, has surpassed the total deaths during all the wars waged around the world between the Communist Party’s founding in 1921 and when it took power in 1949.

An excellent example of the Communist Party’s use of violence is its support of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. Under the Khmer Rouge, a quarter of Cambodia’s population, including a majority of Chinese immigrants and their descendants, were murdered. China still blocks the international community from putting the Khmer Rouge on trial, so as to cover up the CCP’s notorious role in the genocide.

The CCP has had close connections with the world’s most brutal revolutionary armed forces and regimes. In addition to the Khmer Rouge, these have included the communist parties in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Burma, Laos, and Nepal — all of which were established with the support of the CCP. Many leaders in these communist parties were Chinese; some of them are still hiding in China to this day. Other Maoist-based communist parties include South America’s Shining Path and the Japanese Red Army, whose atrocities have been condemned by the world community.

One of the theories the communists employ is social Darwinism. The Communist Party applies Darwin’s inter-species competition to human relationships and human history, maintaining that class struggle is the only driving force for societal development. Struggle, therefore, became the primary “belief” of the Communist Party, a tool in gaining and maintaining political control. For instance, a famous quote from Mao Zedong — “With eight hundred million people, how can it work without struggle?” — shows the Party’s logic of “survival of the fittest” at work. Another similarly famous saying from Mao was that a campaign like the Cultural Revolution should be conducted “every seven or eight years.” [5] Repetitive use of force is an important means for the CCP to maintain its rule in China. The goal of using force is to create terror. Every struggle and movement has served as an exercise in terror, so that the Chinese people are in a constant state of fear, become submissive, and are gradually enslaved under the Party’s control.

Today, terrorism has become the main enemy of the civilized and free world. The CCP’s exercise of violent terror, thanks to the apparatus of the state, has been larger in scale and much longer lasting, and its results have been more devastating. Today, in the twenty-first century, we should not forget this inherited character of the Communist Party, since it will definitely play a crucial role in the destiny of the CCP in the years to come.

The level of violence employed by a form of government determines its level of civilization. By resorting to the use of violence, communist regimes clearly represent a huge step backward in this regard. Unfortunately, the Communist Party has been seen as progressive by those who believe that violence is an essential and inevitable means of societal advancement. This acceptance of violence has to be viewed as one result of the unrivaled and skillful use of deception and lies by the Communist Party, another inherited trait of the CCP.

“Since a young age, we have thought of the U.S. as a lovable country. We believe this is partly due to the fact that the U.S. has never occupied China, nor has it launched any attacks on China. More fundamentally, the Chinese people hold good impressions of the U.S. based on the democratic and open-minded character of its people.” So stated an editorial published on July 4, 1947, in the CCP’s official newspaper, Xinhua Daily. A mere three years later, the CCP sent soldiers to fight American troops in North Korea and painted the Americans as the most evil imperialists in the world. Any Chinese person from mainland China would be astonished to read this editorial written more than seventy years ago. The CCP has banned all publications quoting similar early passages and has published rewritten versions.

Since coming to power, the CCP has employed similar artifices in every single movement, including its elimination of counter-revolutionaries (1950–1953), the “partnership” of public and private enterprises (1954–1957), the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957), the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the Tiananmen Square massacre (1989), and, most recently, the persecution of Falun Gong, which began in 1999. The most infamous instance was the persecution of intellectuals in 1957. The CCP called on the intellectuals to offer their opinions, but then persecuted them as “rightists,” using their speeches as evidence of their “crimes.” When some criticized the persecution as a conspiracy or “plot in the dark,” Mao proclaimed, “It is not a plot in the dark, but a stratagem in the open.”

Deception and lies have played a vital role in the CCP’s taking control and staying in control. China enjoys the longest and most complete history in the world, and Chinese intellectuals have had the greatest faith in history since ancient times. The Chinese people have used their understanding of history to assess their current reality and even to achieve personal spiritual improvement. To make history serve the current regime, the CCP has made a practice of altering and concealing historical truth. The CCP, in its propaganda and publications, has rewritten history as far back as the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States periods (770–221 B.C.), and as recent as the Cultural Revolution. Such historical alterations have continued since the CCP seized power, and the Party has ruthlessly blocked and suppressed all efforts to restore historical truth.

When violence alone becomes insufficient to sustain control, the CCP resorts to deception and lies, which serve to justify and mask its rule by violence. Tactics of deception and lies were not invented by communism, of course, but are age-old, unscrupulous ploys that communist regimes have utilized without shame. The CCP promised land to the peasants, factories to the workers, freedom and democracy to the intellectuals, and peace to all. None of these promises has ever been realized. One generation of Chinese died having been deceived, and another generation continues to be cheated. This is the greatest sorrow of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation’s greatest misery.

In one of the televised U.S. presidential debates in 2004, one candidate said that while one could change his tactics when needed, he should never change his “beliefs” or “core values,” as otherwise, he is not credible.

This statement is worth reflecting on. The Communist Party constantly changes its “beliefs” and “core values.” Since its establishment, the CCP has held 19 national representative conventions and modified the Party constitution nearly two dozen times. Since it came to power in 1949, the CCP has made multiple major modifications to the Chinese Constitution.

A stated goal of communist parties is to bring about social equality that leads to a communist society. Today, however, communist-controlled China has become a nation with the most serious economic inequalities in the world. Many CCP members have become extremely rich, while hundreds of millions of Chinese still live in poverty.

The guiding theories of the CCP started with Marxism-Leninism, to which was added Maoism, then Deng Xiaoping Theory, and more recently Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents.” Marxism-Leninism and Maoism are not at all compatible with Deng’s theories and Jiang’s ideology — they are actually the opposite. This hodgepodge of communist theories employed by the CCP is indeed an abomination of history.

The Communist Party’s evolving principles have largely contradicted one another. From the idea of a global integration transcending the nation-state to today’s extreme nationalism, from eliminating all private ownership and all exploitative classes to today’s notion of promoting capitalists to join the Party, yesterday’s principles have become reversed in today’s politics, with further change expected tomorrow. But no matter how often the CCP changes its principles, the goal remains the same: gaining and sustaining absolute control over society.

In the history of the CCP, there have been more than a dozen movements that were “life and death” struggles. In reality, all of these struggles have coincided with a transfer of power following changes of basic Party principles. Every change in principles has come as the CCP faced a major threat to its legitimacy and survival. Whether it be collaborating with the Kuomintang Party, adopting a pro-U.S. foreign policy, enacting economic reform and market expansion, or promoting nationalism, these decisions were made at a moment of crisis and all had to do with gaining or solidifying power. Every cycle in which a particular group suffered persecution, only for there to be a reversal of that persecution a few years later, has been connected with changes in the basic principles of the CCP.

As a biblical proverb states, "Truth will last forever; lies are soon found out." There is wisdom in this saying.

The CCP is a Leninist authoritarian regime. Since the inception of the CCP, three basic lines have been established: the intellectual line, the political line, and the organization line.

The intellectual line refers to the Communist Party’s philosophical foundation. The political line refers to the way it sets goals. The organization line refers to how the goals are achieved within a strict organizational body. The first and foremost requirement of all CCP members and those ruled by the CCP is to obey commands unconditionally. This is what the organization line is all about.

In China, most people know about the double personalities of CCP members. In private settings, CCP members are ordinary human beings with feelings of happiness, anger, sorrow, and joy. They possess ordinary human beings’ merits and shortcomings. They may be parents, husbands, wives, or friends. But placed above their human nature and feelings is their “Party nature,” which, according to the requirements of the Communist Party, overrides humanity. Thus, humanity becomes relative and changeable, while Party nature becomes absolute and beyond any doubt or challenge.

During the Cultural Revolution, it was all too common for fathers and sons to torture each other, husbands and wives to struggle with each other, mothers and daughters to report on each other, and students and teachers to treat each other like enemies. Party nature caused the conflicts and hatred in these cases. During the early period of the CCP’s rule, many high-ranking Party officials could do nothing but watch as their family members were labeled as class enemies. This, again, was driven by Party nature.

The power of Party nature over the individual results from the CCP’s prolonged course of indoctrination. This training starts in preschool and kindergarten, when giving Party-sanctioned answers to questions — answers that do not comply with common sense or a child’s human nature — is rewarded. Students receive political education from primary school through college, and if they do not learn to give standard Party-sanctioned answers, they are not allowed to pass exams and graduate.

A Party member must remain consistent with the Party line when speaking publicly, no matter how he feels privately.

The organizational structure of the CCP is a gigantic pyramid, with the central power on top controlling the entire hierarchy. This structure is one of the most important features of the CCP regime, one that helps it to produce absolute conformity. Today, the CCP has completely degenerated into a political entity struggling to maintain self-interest. It no longer pursues any of the lofty goals of communism. However, the organizational structure of communism remains, and its demand for unconditional conformity has not changed. The Party positions itself above humanity and human nature, removing any organizations or persons deemed detrimental or a potential threat to its hold on power, whether ordinary citizens or high-ranking CCP officials.

Everything under heaven experiences a life cycle of birth, maturity, decay, and death.

Unlike the communist regime, non-communist societies, even those suffering under rigid totalitarian rule and dictatorship, often allow some degree of self-organization and self-determination. Ancient Chinese society was ruled according to a binary structure. In rural regions, clans were the center of an independent social organization, while urban areas were organized around local guilds. The top-down government did not extend below the county level. Even the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi) regime, perhaps the cruelest regime under a dictatorship other than those of communist parties, allowed the right to private property. Communist regimes eradicate any forms of social organization or elements independent of the Party, replacing them with highly centralized power structures from the top down. If bottom-up social structures allow for the natural self-determination of individuals or groups, then communist rule by its essence opposes this natural state of society.

The Communist Party does not respect universal truths of human nature. It arbitrarily manipulates concepts of good and evil, as well as all laws and rules. Communists do not allow murder, except of those categorized as enemies by the Communist Party. Filial piety is welcomed, except toward parents deemed to be class enemies. The traditional values of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and faithfulness are good, but not applicable when the Party is not willing or doesn’t want to consider them.

The Communist Party completely overthrows the universal standards for human nature and builds itself on principles that oppose human nature.

Non-communist societies generally consider humanity’s dual nature of good and evil, and they rely on fixed social contracts to maintain a balance in society. In communist societies, however, the very concept of human nature is denied, and neither good nor evil is acknowledged. Eliminating the concepts of good and evil, according to Marx, serves to completely overthrow the superstructure [6] of the old society.

The Communist Party does not believe in the divine, nor does it even respect physical nature. “Battle with heaven, fight with the earth, struggle with humans — therein lies endless joy.” This was the motto of the CCP during the Cultural Revolution, a time when unprecedented suffering was inflicted on the Chinese people and the land.

The Chinese traditionally believe in the unity of heaven and human beings. As Lao Tzu said in the Tao-Te Ching, “Man follows the earth, the earth follows heaven, heaven follows the Tao, and the Tao follows what is natural.” [7] Human beings and nature exist within a harmonious relationship in the continuous cosmos.

The Communist Party can be thought of as a kind of being, one that opposes nature, heaven, earth, and mankind. It is an evil specter opposing the universe.

The Communist Party’s organizations themselves never participate in productive or creative activities. Once they grasp power, they attach themselves to the people, controlling and manipulating them. They extend their power down to the most basic units of society, for fear of losing control. They monopolize the resources of production and extract wealth from the populace.

In China, the CCP extends itself everywhere and controls everything, but nobody has ever seen the CCP’s accounting records, only the records of the state, local governments, or enterprises. From the central government down to the village committees in rural areas, municipal officials are always ranked lower than the communist cadres in their strata, so municipal governments must follow instructions from Party committees of the same level. The expenditures of the Party are taken care of by the municipal units and accounted for in the municipal system.

The organization of the CCP, like a giant, evil possessing spirit, attaches to every single unit and cell of Chinese society as tightly as a shadow following an object. The CCP’s finest blood-sucking channels penetrate deeply into every capillary and cell of the society, and thus the Party controls and manipulates all of society. This peculiar structure of evil possession has existed previously in human history, either partially or temporarily, but never has it operated for so long and controlled a society so completely as it does under the rule of the Communist Party.

For this reason, Chinese farmers live in poverty and drudgery. They not only have to support the traditional municipal officials, but also as many or even more communist cadres.

For this reason, Chinese workers have lost their employment in vast numbers. The omnipresent blood-sucking channels of the possessing CCP have been extracting funds from their factories for many years.

For this reason, Chinese intellectuals find it extremely difficult to gain intellectual freedom. In addition to their administrators, there are CCP shadows lurking everywhere, doing nothing but monitoring people.

A possessing spirit has to control absolutely the mind of the possessed in order to drain energy for its survival.

According to modern political science, power comes from three main sources: force, wealth, and knowledge. The Communist Party has never hesitated to use force and monopolistic control to rob people of their property. But more importantly, it has deprived people of freedom of speech and of the press. It has raped people’s spirits and will in order to maintain its rule. The CCP’s evil possession controls society so tightly that it can hardly be compared to any other regime in history.

In the 1848 The Communist Manifesto, the first programmatic document of the Communist Party, Marx proclaimed, “A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Communism.” [8]

Over a century later, communism is more than a haunting specter: It has possessed a concrete, material body. It has spread around the world like an epidemic, killing tens of millions and taking away property and the free minds and spirit of hundreds of millions. The basic tenet of the Communist Party is to take away all private property so as to eliminate the “exploitative class.” Private property is the basis of all social rights and often carries national culture. People who are robbed of private property also lose a free mind and spirit. They may further lose the freedom to acquire social and political rights.

Facing a crisis of survival, the CCP was forced to reform China’s economy in the 1980s. Some of the rights to private property were restored to the people. This created a hole in the massive CCP machine of precise control. This hole has become enlarged as the CCP’s members strive to accumulate their private fortunes.

The CCP, an evil possessing specter supported by force, deception, and the frequent change of its appearance and image, has now shown signs of decay and is nervous at every slight disturbance. It attempts to survive by accumulating more wealth and tightening control, but these actions only serve to intensify the crisis. Today’s China appears prosperous, but social conflicts have been built up to a level never before seen. Using political intrigues it used in the past, the CCP may feign some sort of retreat, redressing the Tiananmen Square massacre or the persecution of Falun Gong, then finding other groups to be its chosen enemies, thereby continuing to exercise its regime of violence and terror.

Facing challenges in its contemporary history, the Chinese responded by importing weapons, reforming their political systems, and finally resorting to extreme and violent revolutions. Countless lives have been lost, and most of the Chinese traditional culture has been destroyed. Today’s China shows that this final response — that of violent revolution — has ended in utter failure. When agitation and anxiety occupied the Chinese mind, the CCP took the opportunity to enter the scene, and eventually brought the world’s last surviving ancient civilization under its control.

When it comes to future challenges, the Chinese people will inevitably have to choose again. No matter how the choice is made, every Chinese person must understand that any lingering hope in the CCP will only worsen the damage done to the Chinese nation and inject new energy into this evil possessing CCP.

We must abandon all illusions, thoroughly examine ourselves without being influenced by hatred, greed, or desires. Only then can we rid ourselves of the nightmarish control by the possessing spirit of the CCP of the last several decades. In the name of a free nation, we can reestablish the Chinese civilization based on respect for human nature and compassion for all.

This concludes Commentary One.

Notes:

[1] Xinhai Revolution, named for the Chinese year of Xinhai (1911), was the overthrow (October 10, 1911–February 12, 1912) of China’s ruling Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China.

[2] The May Fourth Movement was the first mass movement in modern Chinese history and began on May 4, 1919.

[3] www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch04.htm

[4] The Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, originated in 1912 and ruled much of China from 1928 until its defeat by the CCP in 1949.

[5] Mao Zedong’s letter to his wife, Jiang Qing (1966).

[6] Marxist thought divides society into two parts: the base, which consists of forces and relations of economic production, and the superstructure, which consists of everything else, including politics and culture.

[7] From Chapter 25 of the Tao-Te Ching, one of the most important Taoist texts.

[8] www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm