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Chapter 13. Death By Chinese Pogrom: When Mao Met Orwell And Deng Xiaoping In Tiananmen Square
ommunism is not love. Communism is a hammer, which we use to crush the enemy.
—Mao Zedong
In China’s “worker’s paradise,” far too often the “enemies” of the Communist Party state are the citizens of China themselves. These citizen-enemies are the real hard-working people in the “People’s” Republic who want higher wages and better working conditions, who long for clean water and breathable air, who strive for reasonable health and pension benefits, and who desperately and fervently seek the freedom to express their political and religious views.
In conquered territories like Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang province, these Chinese Communist Party “enemies” are also the indigenous peoples who dare to seek autonomy from Beijing, who demand some rightful share of the prosperity created from the exploitation of the resources in their homeland, and who deeply and viscerally resent a massive influx of the dominant ethnic Han Chinese immigrants imported by Beijing for the express purpose of diluting and “cleansing” their gene pool.
For these hundreds of millions of victims of the People’s Republic of China, it’s a trifecta of:
• Home-grown repression from a pollution-rife economic growth model run on 50-cent labor
• A rigid, class-based Communist Party theocracy that provides for little upward mobility, and
• An “Orwell on steroids” totalitarianism that watches every little move you make, constricts every breath you take, and brooks absolutely no opposition
In fact, the ironically named “People’s Republic” is neither a representative democracy with leaders duly elected at the ballot box by the people nor is it a “republic” where its citizens in any way, shape, or form retain significant control over the government. Instead, the meetings and decision-making processes of the ruling Chinese Communist Party are completely opaque and filtered by a media the party controls with an iron fist.
The Big Lie Begins with China’s Name and Is Told by Its Constitution
Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
—Article 35 of China’s Constitution
Just as the name of China—the “People’s Republic”—is a lie steeped in irony, so, too, is the Constitution of the People’s Republic a charade laced with absurdities. While Article 35 guarantees rights like freedom of speech, association, assembly, and demonstration, to exercise any one of them—especially demonstration—is to invite either a severe beating or jail, or both.
As for freedom of the press, a prerequisite for a successful police state is its ability to both control information flows and to mold internal and external perceptions of reality through the management of incoming and outgoing communications. This is a two-step process of suppressing real information and replacing it with convincing falsehoods; and China uses its newspapers and electronic media to do this very well. In fact, the latest Press Freedom Index published204 by Reporters Without Borders ranked China 171 out of 178, putting it just ahead of a half dozen heavily censored black holes like the Sudan, North Korea, and Iran.
As for Article 40 of the Constitution, it reads, “The freedom and privacy of correspondence of citizens of the People’s Republic of China are protected by law.” This, too, is laughable. Just try to go on the Internet in China and send an email to a friend. Your supposedly “private” missive will be screened by a “Great Firewall” that employs over 50,000 cybercops and censors; and we’ve personally seen this happen205 when the police in Shenzhen detained dissidents we had scheduled to meet via email.
To see China’s Great Firewall in action, you can also try this: Go to an Internet café in any Chinese city and try typing into your web browser actual phrases like “freedom of speech” or “Tiananmen Square demonstrations.” The resulting links will be blocked. Try it again, and your computer shuts down. Do it repeatedly, and you are likely to get a personal visit206 from one of China’s cybercops—or get busted by someone from a network of amateur enforcers207 who now turn in their fellow Netizens for cash rewards. As Chinese President Hu Jintao has warned:
[We must] further strengthen and improve controls208 on the information web, raising our level of control over virtual society, and perfecting our mechanisms for the channeling of public opinion online.
It’s useful to add here that, like many things in China, censorship is well integrated into Beijing’s economic warfare against its trading partners and competitors. For example, banning Hollywood films from Chinese theaters over claims of cultural and moral objections while tacitly allowing them to be pirated on the streets of Shanghai is clearly a massive trade barrier directed at one of America’s great industries.
Similarly, blocking U.S. firms like Google, YouTube, and Facebook from the Chinese market while nurturing Chinese knockoffs like Baidu, Youku, and RenRen is a clear violation of World Trade Organization rules hidden behind a bizarre assumption that censorship is a valid excuse rather than a compounding evil. As Businessweek has noted, “If Facebook grew corn or built cars,209 the cry would go out that China was putting up barriers to trade.”
And here’s another entry for the irony file: The fact that so many Chinese citizens are hauled off to jail for attempts to exercise the freedoms defined in Articles 35 and 40 clearly suggests that the police in China haven’t bothered to read Article 37 of the Constitution. It states
The freedom of person of citizens of the People’s Republic of China is inviolable.
In fact, today, there are as many as two million Chinese citizens languishing in more than 300 so-called “Reeducation Through Labor” camps; and tens of thousands of these citizens have been locked up210 for crimes like being an “unregistered” Christian or for being outed as a member of the Falun Gong religious sect. This, too, is most curious because Article 36 of the constitution clearly states
Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief.
Of course, when ordinary Chinese citizens are forced to confront the stark contrast between the ideals set forth by their own Constitution and the reality of their everyday Orwellian life, they themselves experience their own severe case of cognitive dissonance. Which raises the question: Just how did a country with such an industrious and intelligent people and such a long and rich cultural and economic history descend into the totalitarian hell it is today? To answer that question, it is useful to look at least briefly into several key historical turning points.
A Mighty Imperial Nation Descends into Isolationist Poverty
A huge [Chinese] fleet left port in 1414211 and then sailed westward on a voyage of trade and exploration. The undertaking far surpassed anything Columbus...could have envisioned. The fleet included at least 62 massive trading Galileans, any of which could have held Columbus’s three small ships on its decks.
—The Emperor’s Giraffe
Much of the innovation and vibrance we associate with China has its roots in the Tang Dynasty (from about 600 to 900 A.D.) and the early Ming Dynasty (from about 1370 to 1450). During both of these periods, China—the inventor of everything from the compass, gunpowder, and multistage rockets to paper money, wheelbarrows, whiskey, and chess—was by far the wealthiest, most powerful, most stable, and advanced civilization on Earth.
During the Ming Dynasty specifically, while Europe slumbered in the dark ages, China developed a robust consumer economy supported by technological innovation and a massive trading empire. It was during this period that the third Ming emperor launched the largest fleets of exploration the world has ever seen—before or since.
As chronicled in Samuel Wilson’s The Emperor’s Giraffe, China’s imperial expeditionary fleet consisted of hundreds of massive “treasure ships”—some half the length of a modern cruise ship. They carried tens of thousands of Chinese sailors to India, Africa, and the Middle East, and they returned with tribute and ambassadors from afar. By comparison, Christopher Columbus’s ensemble was a pitiful little group of dinghies, and with this projection of its imperial fleet, China was poised to become an international power that might easily have pushed aside Spain and England in the sixteenth century quest for global supremacy.
China’s imperial dream was not to be realized, however. In 1433, powerful court eunuchs abruptly squelched the explorations, destroyed the ships, and even tried to eradicate the records of the voyage. What followed would be a ruinous policy of isolationism during which the once-great nation of China slowly fell into its own dark ages while the West flourished.
Despite its isolationism, in the early 1800s,212 China still accounted for fully one-third of the world’s gross domestic product versus America’s meager 3%.213 Yet at this pivotal point in history, China completely rejected the Industrial Revolution.
Instead, in one of the great boomerangs of history, Chinese technologies such as gunpowder and the compass were weaponized by European nations that eventually came to plunder the once proud and mighty Middle Kingdom. It was during this long period of what the Chinese refer to as the “foreign humiliation” that the emerging powers of the West established colonial beachheads in the port cities of Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai. These colonialists came not in peace but to extract China’s wealth and ship it back to England, Holland, and Portugal.
It was likewise during this period that Britain launched its Opium Wars to force China to accept deadly opium imports from India so Britain could balance its huge trade deficit with China in goods like cotton, silk, and tea. These wars culminated with the Boxer Rebellion, a Chinese uprising against foreigners that was brutally put down by a joint expeditionary force of European and American armies. It was these foreign armies marching into the Forbidden City and past the tombs of the great Ming emperors that shredded the last bit of Chinese dignity, patience, and, most importantly, cohesion.
In the wake of this foreign humiliation, China slowly disintegrated into full-scale revolution. After the briefest wisp of hope for a republic under Sun Yat-sen in 1912, China was soon embroiled in a bloody, multidimensional civil war between nationalists, communists, and various private warlords. This was a debilitating chaos that invited a crushingly brutal invasion by Japan and climaxed in the rise of Mao Zedong, the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, and the flight of Chinese nationalist forces to the beachhead of Taiwan.
What Mao Did During Woodstock
Nanjing is a big city of 500,000...the number of people executed in Nanjing is too low, more people should be killed in Nanjing.
—Mao Zedong’s instructions on the suppression of counter-revolutionaries in Nanjing and Shanghai
To Mao Zedong’s credit, he did reunify China under ethnic Chinese or “Han” rule, unconditionally expel all foreigners, and restore Chinese pride. That said, the price the people of China have had to pay in blood, sweat, tears, forced labor, jail, and paranoia for Mao’s communist-style liberation has been a very heavy one.
Consider that while Hitler killed or exterminated about 12 million civilians and Stalin about 23 million in his famines and purges, Mao’s death toll ranges anywhere from 49 to 78 million. That makes Mao the worst mass murderer of all time—at214 least according to Piero Scaruffi, who has catalogued history’s most horrible genocides.
In fact, during the two-and-a-half decades of Mao’s rule, when he wasn’t swimming across the Yangtze River for sport, the frenetic Chairman would leap from one mad program or pogrom to another. For example, his “Great Leap Forward” included melting all the steel in the country in useless homemade forges and killing all the sparrows. Economic disaster and widespread famine inevitably followed in the footsteps of Mao’s often quite literally insane reforms.
Equally disastrous—and terrifying—were Mao’s periodic purges of counter-revolutionaries, intellectuals, and members of his own party he labeled “capitalist roaders.” The phenomenon of the 1960s known as the “Cultural Revolution” was particularly brutal; and all those who lived through it are scarred by the experience.
During this Cultural Revolution, while the Rolling Stones and Beatles were emerging from Great Britain to rock the music world and hippies sought peace and love in the fields of Woodstock, crazed vigilantes known as Red Guards roamed the streets of China in search of victims for their peculiar political violence. At the same time, businessmen, intellectuals, and professors were blamed for all of China’s ills and were forced into manual labor while citizens lacking revolutionary zeal were routinely rounded up, publicly humiliated, beaten, and locked in labor camps for years. Even as the Chinese economy continued to retreat further into stagnation, the people of China were taught to lie to survive and obey to advance; and this Orwellian pall over the People’s Republic remains Mao’s most lasting legacy.
State Capitalism Rises from the Rubble of State Communism
It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.
—Deng Xiaoping
The man who lifted China out of the Mao economic morass was Deng Xiaoping. He was a former revolutionary and purged party leader who had been sent to work in a tractor factory during the Cultural Revolution. After his son was beaten by Red Guards and thrown from a fourth story window, Deng was pardoned and rehabilitated by Hua Guofeng, who became Mao’s heir apparent.
Following the Chairman’s death, the wily Deng outfoxed Mao’s widow and her notorious Gang of Four as well as the man who saved him. While never formally claiming the official party titles of leadership, Deng unofficially seized power, and everyone understood he was the true puppet master.
In truth, Deng Xiaoping is the most important figure in the China of today for at least two reasons. First, while the Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev gave in to protestors and allowed the breakup of a Communistic Soviet Union, it was Deng who ordered the Chinese military to slaughter the protestors in Tiananmen Square in 1989—thus preserving the ruthless and repressionary Communist Chinese state.
Equally important, Deng is credited with singlehandedly pushing forward the brand of state-subsidized mercantilist capitalism that is the hallmark of the “beggar thy neighbor” Chinese economy of today. For it was Deng who opened special economic zones to the West and who would ultimately unleash a massive labor force on world markets armed with potent weapons of job destruction like illegal export subsidies and a manipulated currency.
It is this China of today created by Mao and Deng that is as harsh on its own citizenry as it is unfair to its trading partners. In the next chapter, we will catalogue the repression and brutality in all of its Death by China on China inglory. As we do so, you will see how the twin legacies of Chairman Mao and Deng Xiaoping continue to live on in an ever-more-ruthless totalitarian police state.
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