Preface
For five thousand years, the Chinese nation has grown and flourished on this land nourished by the Yellow River and the Yangtze, passing through dozens of dynasties and creating a brilliant civilization — a story of rises and falls, prosperity and decline, sweeping and gripping in its drama.
The year 1840 is generally regarded by historians as the beginning of modern Chinese history, and also as the starting point of China's transition from the medieval era into modernity. From that point on, Chinese civilization went through roughly four waves of challenge and response. The first three waves of challenge can be traced to the shocks caused by the Anglo-French forces' capture of Beijing in 1860, the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894, and the Russo-Japanese War of 1906, fought on Chinese soil in Manchuria. China's corresponding responses were, respectively, the importation of Western technology (the Self-Strengthening Movement), institutional reform (the Hundred Days' Reform and the Qing constitutional movement), and later the 1911 Revolution.
Because after the First World War the interests of China — one of the victorious powers — were disregarded by the other great powers, many Chinese people at the time concluded that all three of the earlier waves of response had failed. This gave rise to the May Fourth Movement, ushering in the fourth and final wave of response: wholesale Westernization at the cultural level, which subsequently gave way to an extreme revolutionary movement — the communist movement.
This article's concern is the outcome of China's final wave of response — the communist movement and the Communist Party. It seeks to analyze just what kind of result China has arrived at — or, more accurately, had forced upon it — after more than 160 years, at the cost of nearly one hundred million unnatural deaths and the near-total loss of China's traditional culture and civilization.
I. Seizing and Maintaining Power Through Violence and Terror
'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.' This is how the Communist Manifesto ends. Violence is the means by which the Communist Party seizes power — indeed its primary means — and this was fixed as the Party's first genetic trait from the very day of its birth.
The world's first Communist Party, in fact, did not come into being until many years after Marx's death. The Bolshevik Party of Soviet Russia was formally founded the year after the October Revolution of 1917. This party was born out of violence against 'class enemies,' and thereafter sustained itself through violence against its own members. In its internal purges, the Soviet Communist Party slaughtered more than twenty million people as 'spies,' 'traitors,' and dissidents.
When the Chinese Communist Party was founded, it was itself a branch of the Comintern controlled by the Soviet Communist Party, and it naturally inherited this tradition of violence. During the so-called First Chinese Civil War, from 1927 to 1936, the population of Jiangxi fell from more than 20 million to just over 10 million — a glimpse of just how severe the devastation was.
If violence is unavoidable in the wars fought to seize power, the world has still never seen a regime as devoted to violence in peacetime as the Communist Party. After 1949, the number of Chinese people brutally killed by CCP violence actually exceeded the number killed during the nearly thirty preceding years of war.
The extreme case of this is Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, which the Chinese Communist Party backed with all its might. After seizing power, the Khmer Rouge went on to slaughter a full quarter of Cambodia's entire population, including most of the country's ethnic Chinese residents and overseas Chinese. And to this day, the CCP continues to obstruct any public international tribunal on the Khmer Rouge, its purpose plainly being to continue concealing the role it played and the reprehensible part it acted in these events.
It must be pointed out that the world's most brutal armed insurgencies and regimes have almost all had close ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Besides the Khmer Rouge, the Indonesian Communist Party, the Communist Parties of the Philippines, Malaya, Vietnam, Burma, Laos, and Nepal, among others, were all established with the CCP's direct support; many of their leaders were ethnic Chinese, and some remain in hiding in China to this day.
Maoist communist parties around the world — including Peru's Shining Path in South America and Japan's Red Army — are likewise notorious the world over for their brutal conduct, universally condemned.
One of the theoretical sources of communism is the theory of evolution. The Communist Party extended the concept of competition among species to class struggle in social evolution, holding that class struggle is the sole driving force behind social development and progress. As a result, struggle became the Communist Party's primary 'faith' for gaining and sustaining power. Mao Zedong's famous line — 'With 800 million people, how can we manage without struggle?' — was a direct expression of this survival logic.
Equally famous is another of Mao's remarks: that the Cultural Revolution should be repeated 'once every seven or eight years.' Repeated use of violence is an essential means by which the Communist regime sustains its rule. The purpose of violence is to manufacture fear. Every political campaign is a training session in fear conducted by the Communist Party, making the people submit with trembling hearts until they become slaves to their own fear.
Today, terrorism has become the number one enemy of the civilized, free world. But the Communist Party's violent terrorism, carried out through the vehicle of the state itself, operates on a far greater scale, persists far longer, and inflicts far more severe harm. Here in the twenty-first century, we must not forget that this genetic trait of the Communist Party will, when the moment comes, inevitably play a decisive role in determining the Party's future course.
II. Using Lies as the Lubricant of Violence
One measure of the degree of a society's civilization is the extent to which violence plays a role within its institutions. Communist societies clearly represent a great regression in human civilization. And yet the Communist Party once succeeded in convincing much of the world that it represented progress instead — that the use of violence was a necessary and inevitable part of this social progress.
This can only be attributed to the Communist Party's unrivaled mastery of lies and deception. Deception and lying are thus another of the Communist Party's genetic traits.
'Ever since we were young, we have felt that America is an especially amiable country. We believe this is not only because she has never seized Chinese territory by force, nor waged any war of aggression against China; more fundamentally, the Chinese people's fondness for America stems from the democratic bearing and expansive generosity that radiate from the American national character.'
This was an editorial published on July 4, 1947, in the CCP Central Committee's official organ, Xinhua Daily. Barely three years later, the CCP sent troops to fight the United States head-on in North Korea, and portrayed Americans as the most evil imperialists on earth. Anyone from mainland China who reads this CCP editorial from more than fifty years ago cannot help but be utterly astonished — so much so that the CCP has had to ban and suppress the republication of books containing similar articles.
After the CCP came to power, the same tactics were used again and again — in the Suppression of Counter-revolutionaries, the campaign for public-private joint ownership, the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Cultural Revolution, the June Fourth massacre, and the persecution of Falun Gong. The most notorious case is from 1957, when the CCP called on intellectuals to offer criticism of the Party, only to use their responses as a blueprint for hunting down 'rightists.' When accused of scheming, Mao Zedong openly declared that it was not a hidden scheme but an 'open scheme' — a trap laid out in plain sight.
Lies and deception have played an extremely important role throughout this process of seizing and preserving power. Chinese intellectuals have, since ancient times, possessed a deep historical consciousness. China has the longest and most complete continuous historical record of any nation in the world, because the Chinese have always used history as a basis for judging the present, and even as a means of achieving personal spiritual elevation. For this reason, concealing and falsifying history has become one of the Chinese Communist Party's most important instruments of rule. From as far back as the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods to as recently as the Cultural Revolution, history has been comprehensively concealed, falsified, and rewritten without interruption for more than fifty years, and every effort to restore history's true face has been ruthlessly suppressed and stamped out.
Whenever violence alone is not enough, and needs to be concealed and dressed up, deception and lies step onto the stage. Lies are the other face of violence, and also its lubricant.
It must be acknowledged that this was not something the Communist Party invented from scratch — it merely took gangster tactics that had always existed and elevated them into a grand, official practice. The Chinese Communist Party promised land to the peasants, factories to the workers, freedom and democracy to the intellectuals, and peace to everyone — and to this day, not a single one of these promises has been fulfilled. One generation of deceived Chinese people has died off, only for another generation to remain captivated by the CCP's lies. This is the greatest sorrow of the Chinese people, and a profound misfortune for the Chinese nation.
III. Ever-Shifting Positions and Principles
During a televised debate in the 2004 U.S. presidential election, one of the candidates said that a person may often change his views on particular issues, but must not keep shifting the underlying principles by which he judges those issues — otherwise, that person cannot be trusted. This remark is deeply instructive.
The Communist Party is a textbook example of exactly this failing. Take the Chinese Communist Party: over eighty years since its founding, across sixteen National Congresses, it revised its own Party constitution sixteen times, and in the fifty years since seizing power, it overhauled China's national constitution five times.
The Communist Party's stated ideal is social equality, and the ultimate expression of that equality is the realization of communism itself. Yet today, China under Communist Party rule has become one of the countries with the most severe wealth gap on earth, with senior officials of the party-state, resting atop a base of 800 million people living in poverty, largely transformed into fabulously wealthy magnates.
The CCP's guiding ideology began with Marxism-Leninism, then added Mao Zedong Thought, then Deng Xiaoping Theory, and finally the Three Represents. Yet Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory or Jiang Zemin's Three Represents have essentially nothing to do with one another — worlds, even universes, apart in their actual content — and yet the CCP manages to place them all side by side on the very same altar for worship. It is truly one of the great spectacles of all time.
The Communist Party has gone from proclaiming that the proletariat has no homeland and championing the establishment of a great worldwide commonwealth, to today's extreme nationalism; from expropriating all private property and overthrowing every exploiting class, to today's active recruitment of capitalists into the Party — its basic principles pointing in diametrically opposite directions goes without saying. Throughout its history of rising to power and holding onto it, cases abound in which a principle upheld yesterday is abandoned today, only to be reversed again tomorrow. But no matter how the principles change, the Communist Party's goal remains crystal clear: to seize and hold onto power, and to enjoy an absolute monopoly over social power.
The more than a dozen so-called 'life-and-death' line struggles in CCP history were, when stripped of their pretenses, nothing more than internal power struggles that occurred whenever the Party's positions and principles were being changed.
It should be noted that every shift in the Party's positions and principles has come about because the CCP's legitimacy and survival ran into an unavoidable crisis. This was true of the KMT-CCP alliance, the pro-American diplomacy, the reform-and-opening policy, and the promotion of nationalism — every single one of these compromises was made purely to seize or consolidate power. And every recurring cycle of crackdown followed by rehabilitation has arisen from precisely this same pattern.
As a Western saying goes: truth needs to be upheld consistently, while lies are forever changing. How wise these words are!
IV. Replacing and Extinguishing Human Nature With Party Nature
The Chinese Communist Party is a Leninist party. From its very founding, the CCP established three fundamental lines: the political line, the ideological line, and the organizational line. Put in plain terms, the ideological line is the Party's philosophical foundation, the political line sets its goals, and the organizational line achieves those goals through a rigid, strictly disciplined organizational structure.
The very first thing demanded of Communist Party members, and of the people living under communist society, is absolute obedience — this is the entire content of the so-called organizational line.
People in China are well aware of the widespread dual personality of Communist Party members. In private settings, Party members generally display ordinary human nature — the usual joys, angers, sorrows, and pleasures of any person, along with the ordinary virtues and flaws of any human being. They may be fathers, husbands, or good friends. But standing above all of this human nature is what the Party emphasizes most: Party nature. And Party nature, as the Party demands, must forever take precedence over ordinary human nature. Human nature is treated as relative and changeable, while Party nature is treated as absolute, beyond doubt, beyond challenge.
During the Cultural Revolution, it was commonplace throughout China for fathers and sons to turn on each other, husbands and wives to become enemies, mothers and daughters to inform against one another, and teachers and students to struggle against each other — this was Party nature at work. In the Party's early years, there were even more cases of senior CCP cadres unable to save family members who had been classified as class enemies and subjected to persecution — likewise the workings of Party nature.
This kind of Party nature is the product of long-term training by the Communist Party's organizational apparatus, and this training begins as early as kindergarten. In early childhood education, the officially designated 'correct answers,' though they may run counter to common sense and to children's own natural instincts, are nonetheless the standard by which academic performance is judged. In the political education given at every level, from primary and secondary school through university, students learn that they must conform to the Party's designated correct answers, or else they cannot pass or graduate.
No matter what a Party member may say to you in private, once he speaks in his capacity as a Party member, he must invariably align himself with 'the organization.' This organization runs from the bottom all the way up, converging finally at the single apex of this vast pyramid — and this is the single most important structural feature of Communist rule: absolute obedience.
Today, the CCP has completely degenerated into a political clique focused entirely on preserving its own interests, and may no longer pursue the goal of communism at all — yet its organizational principles remain unchanged, and its demand for absolute obedience through Party nature remains unchanged as well. This Party exists in a manner that places itself above all humanity and human nature; anyone who threatens, or is thought to potentially threaten, the Party's organization or its leaders will be swiftly eliminated, whether that person is an ordinary citizen or a senior CCP leader.
V. An Evil Spirit That Defies Nature and Humanity
Everything in heaven and earth follows its own life cycle of birth, growth, decline, and death.
Unlike Communist regimes, every non-Communist society, no matter how despotic or totalitarian, retains some degree of spontaneous, self-organized elements. Ancient Chinese society, in fact, had a dual structure: in the countryside, self-organization centered around clan lineages; in towns and cities, around trade guilds. The top-down apparatus of government, meanwhile, only administered matters at the county level and above.
Even the harshest totalitarian societies of the modern era outside of communism, such as Nazi Germany, still preserved private property rights and private ownership. Under Communist rule, by contrast, every one of these spontaneous, self-organized elements has been utterly eliminated, replaced by a thoroughly top-down, centralized power structure.
If the former type of society represents a bottom-up condition that arises and grows naturally, then Communist rule represents a condition that is fundamentally unnatural.
In the world of the Communist Party, there is no universal standard of human nature — good and evil, law and principle all become movable standards, shifting as convenient. One must not kill — except enemies designated by the Party. One must honor one's parents — except parents branded as class enemies. One must uphold benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trustworthiness — except whenever the Party decides otherwise. Universal human nature is thereby completely overturned, which is why the Communist Party is also fundamentally anti-human-nature.
Nearly every non-Communist society acknowledges the reality that both good and evil coexist within human nature, and achieves social balance through fixed social contracts. Communist society, by contrast, does not acknowledge human nature at all — it acknowledges neither the goodness within human nature nor its greed and evil. Eradicating these very concepts of good and evil is, in Marx's own words, part of the thorough overthrow of the old world's superstructure.
The Communist Party believes in no god, and shows no respect for nature or the ten thousand things within it — 'struggling against heaven is endless joy, struggling against earth is endless joy, struggling against man is endless joy' — waging war against heaven and earth alike, and brutalizing the people in the process of indulging its own ambitions.
The Chinese have always spoken of the unity of heaven and humanity. As Laozi put it: man models himself on earth, earth models itself on heaven, heaven models itself on the Dao, and the Dao models itself on what is natural. Humanity and nature form one continuous cosmic whole.
The Communist Party is also, in a sense, a kind of living entity — but one that opposes nature, opposes heaven, opposes earth, and opposes humanity: an evil, anti-cosmic being.
VI. The Characteristics of an Evil Spirit's Possession
The Communist Party organization itself does not engage in production or invention. Once it seizes power, it attaches itself to the nation and its people, manipulating and controlling them, dominating even the smallest units of society in order to protect its hold on power, while simultaneously monopolizing the original sources of social wealth in order to extract and drain society's resources.
In China, the Party organization is everywhere, controlling everything, and yet the public never sees a separate financial budget for the Chinese Communist Party organization itself — only budgets for the state, local governments, and enterprises. From the central government all the way down to rural village committees, administrative officials always rank below Party officials, and the government answers to the Party organization at its own corresponding level. The Party's own expenditures are simply absorbed into the budgets of administrative departments, never listed as a separate line item.
This Party organization is like a colossal evil spirit possessing a body, clinging to every single cell of Chinese society like a shadow, sending its fine, blood-draining tubes deep into every capillary and every cell of society, controlling and manipulating it from within.
This bizarre structure of possession has appeared occasionally in human history — sometimes confined to part of a society, sometimes briefly across an entire society — but it has never before been as thorough, as long-lasting, and as stably persistent as it is under Communist society.
This is why Chinese peasants remain so poor and burdened with hardship — they must support not only the traditional government officials, but also a body of 'possessing' Party officials whose numbers equal, or even exceed, those of the administrative officials themselves.
This is why Chinese workers have been laid off on such a massive scale — because these omnipresent blood-draining tubes have, for years, been siphoning off the funds of the very enterprises that employed them.
This is why Chinese intellectuals find freedom so elusive — because beyond the administrative institutions that officially oversee them, there is also that omnipresent yet idle shadow whose sole function is to keep watch over them.
A possessing spirit needs to exert absolute control over the mind of its host in order to draw the energy it needs to sustain its own existence.
Modern political science generally holds that social power derives from three sources: violence, wealth, and knowledge. The Communist Party achieves its goal of absolute control over social power by monopolizing and freely deploying violence, expropriating the people's property, and — most crucially of all — depriving people of freedom of speech and of the press, and stripping them of their free spirit and will. In this sense, the CCP's stranglehold over society, as this possessing entity, has no equal anywhere, in any era, in any part of the world.
VII. Reflecting on Ourselves and Breaking Free of the CCP's Possession
In the Communist Party's very first programmatic document, the Communist Manifesto, Marx declared in 1848 that 'a specter is haunting Europe — the specter of communism.' A hundred years later, communism had become far more than a mere specter — it had taken on a concrete, material reality. Over the hundred years of the last century, this specter spread across the entire world like an epidemic, slaughtering tens of millions of lives and stripping hundreds of millions of people of their personal property, and even of their once-free spirits and souls.
The Communist Party's founding principle was to expropriate all private property and thereby eliminate every 'exploiting class.' Private property belonging to individuals is the foundation of all of a people's social rights, and in many cases also serves as an important vessel for national culture. A people stripped of their private property inevitably finds itself stripped of freedom of spirit and will as well, and ultimately loses the freedom to fight for its social and political rights.
Facing its own crisis of survival, the Chinese Communist Party began economic reform in the 1980s, partially returning property rights to the people — and in doing so, it punched the first hole in the vast, meticulously engineered machine of Communist control. That hole has only grown larger over time, developing into a frenzied scramble by CCP officials at every level to accumulate personal wealth for themselves.
This possessing evil spirit, which sustains itself through violence and lies while constantly changing its outward appearance, has in recent years shown every sign of decline, growing as jumpy and paranoid as a bird startled by the mere twang of a bowstring, panicking at the faintest sound of wind or the cry of a crane. It has tried to save itself through even more frenzied accumulation of wealth and tightening control over power, but this has only deepened and hastened the onset of its crisis.
China today appears prosperous on the surface, but its social crises have accumulated to an unprecedented degree. True to its nature, the CCP may once again resort to its old tricks — perhaps offering some further degree of compromise, rehabilitating those involved in the June Fourth incident or practitioners of Falun Gong, or perhaps manufacturing a 'handful' of new enemies to continue giving it an outlet for displaying its violent, terroristic power.
Over the more than one hundred years of challenges the Chinese nation has faced, its responses — from importing Western technology, to institutional reform, and finally to extreme and violent revolution — have cost countless lives and destroyed the overwhelming majority of the nation's traditional civilization, and have now proven, once again, to be a failed response. Amid the hatred and resentment felt across the entire population, an evil spirit seized the opening and slipped in, ultimately gaining control over what was, until then, the last nation on earth still carrying forward an unbroken ancient civilization.
In the crises still to come, the Chinese people will inevitably have to make a choice once again. But whatever choice they make, the Chinese people must remain clear-eyed: any lingering illusions about this existing possessing evil spirit will only add fuel to the disaster facing the Chinese nation, and will only feed more energy into the evil entity that has attached itself to the nation's body.
Only by abandoning every illusion, thoroughly reflecting on ourselves, and resolutely refusing to be swayed by hatred or greed can there be any hope of finally breaking free from this more-than-fifty-year nightmare of possession — so that, as a free nation once more, the Chinese people can rebuild a Chinese civilization founded on respect for human nature and universal compassion.