The Communist Party's most formidable weapon is its monopoly over thought, and its cruelest instrument is thought control. Ancient tyrants such as Qin Shi Huang; medieval Western religious sects, such as the Orthodox Church; modern revolutionary parties, such as the Jacobins of the French Revolution — all of them likewise sought to monopolize thought, but none carried it through as thoroughly as the Communist Party has. Thought is the expression of an individual's or a group's wisdom and views; applied to social questions, it always hopes to arrange and govern society according to its own conception. Ordinary thinkers merely express their thought — on one hand publishing their own wisdom, on the other hoping to influence society to live according to that wisdom. It is only when thought is seized as a weapon by rulers that it turns cruel. Qin Shi Huang trusted in the Legalists' harsh laws and severe punishments; the Orthodox Church held firmly to its own dogma; the Jacobins were fanatically devoted to their own revolutionary ideas; the Communist Party is a true believer in Marxism-Leninism — such self-confidence is nothing remarkable, indeed only natural. What is peculiar to these people, from ancient times to the present, is that they must force others to believe what they believe, and the tools they use to force the people to believe are the power of the state, or the power of the church. In the hands of the Communist Party, the monopoly over thought — enforced through the brutal instruments of government, coercing people into compliance — has been carried to an absolute extreme.
Thought has an exclusionary quality to it, but thought does not fall from the sky. It is not merely a matter of individual thinking — it is an inheritance from one's ancestors, refined or enriched over time by discarding some elements and adding others. Socialist and Communist thought, for instance, did not begin with Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Ancient Greece had communist ideas; ancient China had the idea of the Great Unity (datong). Even in the periods before and after Marx, there were all kinds and varieties of socialist thought, and Marx's Communist doctrine was merely one strand among many socialist theories. If judged purely by the power of persuasion and influence, apart from organizational power, the influence of Marxist-Leninist socialism, and even of Communism itself, need not have run any deeper than that of other schools of thought. And had it been implemented not through Party power but purely through well-designed policy, the results achieved by almost any other socialist theory might well have surpassed what the Communist Party achieved.
The Communists, as one school of thought among others, have given full rein to their own arrogance, declaring Marxism-Leninism to be a universal truth. Their communism, they say, is scientific, while other schools of socialism are either utopian or mere mouthpieces for the bourgeoisie; and if such a school happens to be a workers' organization, it is slandered as an ‘aristocratic labor’ group or as scabs. The arrogance of the Communists is directed, first, at hatred of these other socialists; and second, at hatred of capitalist thought. That the Communists oppose the capitalist system is at least a position with some internal logic. But what they hate most is, in fact, not the capitalist system itself — since their own economic monopoly inflicts worse harm on the people than anything the capitalist system imposes — what they hate most, rather, is the thought of democracy and freedom that exists under the capitalist system, because such thought is a formidable enemy of their totalitarian system. On this point, the Communists have given full expression to their megalomania, elevating their own dogma to the status of unquestionable cosmic law, to the point of superstition. Blinded by their own fanatical exclusivity and cruelty, worshipping their own doctrine blindly while madly rejecting every other, the Communists have lost their way, losing both truth and reason.
Once these people — self-deceiving, unfathomable, narrow-minded, blindly exclusionary, and intolerant of others — together with Marxism-Leninism, seized the machinery of the state for themselves, these Marxist-Leninists used that machinery of repression to suppress thought itself. That is why I say thought control is the cruelest of all.
Among the Chinese Communists, there were never more than a handful who truly mastered Marxism-Leninism. The Party's founding was, in essence, a matter of ambitious men leading a band of hoodlums and vagrants to ‘conquer the realm,’ later drawing in a number of intellectuals and young people. Even Mao Zedong himself had only a smattering of real knowledge. But having raised the banner of communism, they had no choice but to copy the Soviet Union's every move. Though the Chinese Communist Party's proclamations, propaganda, and campaigns were written in Chinese and carried out by Chinese people, in substance they were nothing but a Chinese replay of Moscow's own conduct.
Marxism-Leninism as an ideological weapon was, of course, a universal slogan among Communists the world over, but in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party it became especially precious, because not one of these Communists, from Mao Zedong himself down to the followers around him, possessed real learning or cultivation, nor rich modern knowledge. Fighting guerrilla warfare and hiding out in mountain gullies, they never even had the opportunity to pursue scholarship or acquire modern knowledge. And so they had no choice but to ‘learn from Russia’ — whatever noise came out of Moscow, they had to declare it fragrant. And so they copied Marxism-Leninism wholesale, copied thought control wholesale, copied everything wholesale. What was copied became their treasure; having no thought of their own, they borrowed a ready-made one, and then had to guard it as jealously as their own eyeballs — because without this magic talisman, the Chinese Communists themselves would not even know what they were.
Marx, for all his arrogance and exclusivity about his own thought, was nonetheless comparatively reasonable. Had he held power, he would surely have been tyrannical in some ways but also reasonable in others — because he had genuine thought, he was a thinker, and however full of hatred and narrow of mind he may have been, he must still have had a reasonable side. Even Lenin himself, whose knowledge derived from Marx, possessed a fairly high level of learning in his own right, since during his years of exile he spent much of his time buried in foreign libraries. Lenin, though a revolutionary, showed both a tyrannical side and, at the same time, some genuine reasoning. Where Marx and Lenin displayed their reasonable side, they carried a real power of persuasion. But then came Stalin, this boy from Georgia — a man who spent the first half of his life engaged in guerrilla activity, with no real scholarly cultivation, his knowledge limited to whatever backward Russia had to offer. Once this man came to power, harboring ambitions of dictatorship, having no ideological system of his own, he had no choice but to adopt Marxist-Leninist thought as his own. He then took quotations out of context and added his own arbitrary interpretations, making Marxism-Leninism serve his ambitions, until he had completed a rigorous and brutal system of thought control — in reality, a crude, low-grade form of thought control. Because it relied on violent coercion rather than persuasion through free and open debate, this control of thought amounted to nothing more than crude suppression.
When this replica of communism reached China, the present-day Chinese ‘master’ of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong, was, in his younger years, a lowly clerk earning eight yuan a month at the Peking University library. Even granting that he studied diligently, that library did not hold many books on Marxism-Leninism or socialism to begin with. This ‘master’ knew no foreign languages; during his years of guerrilla warfare, he could only rely on students returned from Russia to recite to him some Marxist-Leninist and Stalinist pronouncements, or on mimeographed pamphlets to feed his intellectual appetite. And yet it was this very man who came to lead six hundred million people, ruling China by Marxism-Leninism and enshrining Marxism-Leninism as orthodox thought. Having nothing of substance in his own mind, he naturally had no choice but to rely blindly on the ghost of Marx to intimidate people — and he intimidated them to such a degree that, without Marxism-Leninism, it was as if the world would lose its sun. And so, in every utterance, it was Marxist-Leninist thought — and outside of Marxism-Leninism, every other thought became the root of crime.
During the period of Nationalist rule, I recall that the Communists stood together with us in the democratic parties in opposing the unification of thought. The Communists even once supported the human rights movement I called for. Yet in the blink of an eye, power changed hands, and once power was in Communist hands, they copied Moscow's thought control wholesale, extending its demonic grip across every corner of the Chinese mainland. Not only did they propagate Marxism-Leninism as an unprecedented and unsurpassable truth, but they used this ‘truth’ to arm the minds of Party members, and used this ideological weapon to attack every other kind of thought. In attacking other schools of thought and the people who held them, they did not respond lip for lip, word for word, essay for essay, engaging in mutual discussion and debate — instead, they used the whip, punishment, bullets, starvation, intimidation, and the like to force their Marxist-Leninist thought upon others. Marx himself, now dead, may have believed his thought to be merely one authoritative body of ideas among others; but the Chinese Communists, who borrowed this ghost-like doctrine in order to rule over the ten thousand people — Mao Zedong above all, along with his strategist Liu Shaoqi and others — elevated this thought to the status of holy scripture, the will of Heaven, a universal truth of humankind, the highest science. They revered this doctrine even more solemnly than medieval orthodoxy revered its dogma; defending the dogma became, for them, more important even than defending life itself. Because this thing brought them authority, they used it as a powerful tool for deceiving, cheating, and oppressing others. They themselves believed in it willingly; they themselves lacked sufficient knowledge to critically examine it; yet they possessed a selfish cunning that let them exploit it, in order to intimidate and deceive people and preserve their own hold on power.
Mao Zedong and his associates were, in essence, no different from the roving bandits of Chinese history. Indeed, the reason roving bandits grew into great bands and great scourges was owed to objective conditions of the time — political darkness, an incompetent government, and natural disasters that left the people unable to survive, throwing every region into turmoil. Drifting refugees coalesced from small bands into great ones, with men like Zhang Xianzhong and Li Zicheng rising, for a time, to become their leaders. We do not blame the conditions that gave rise to roving banditry, but it is very hard to admire the indiscriminate slaughter, the rivers of blood, and the emptied households these bandits left in their wake. We may sympathize with the righteous indignation of oppressed individuals like Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong, but we can hardly admire their style of governance. After their great campaigns of destruction, these men ultimately failed, leaving behind even greater calamity for the people. Mao Zedong and his associates modeled themselves on Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong; and today they even take credit on behalf of these roving bandits, drawing a lesson from their failure and concluding: ‘Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong had no political program, no proletarian ideological weapon.’ But did Mao Zedong and his associates truly possess a political program and a proletarian ideological weapon of their own? They were nothing but ambitious men, imitators of roving bandits, or a type of rustic pretender to the throne, equally empty inside. But they were shrewd — seeing the success of the Soviet Union's October Revolution of 1917, a handful of ambitious men and intellectuals among the Chinese Communists, from 1921 onward, found for themselves a soul they could use to deceive people and accomplish their aims: Marxism-Leninism. This doctrine was foreign to them, and even more foreign to the Chinese people. But a foreign idol need not save anyone to be able to frighten them. At a time when no one understood what Marxism-Leninism actually was, it was nonetheless carried on the backs of the Communists for tens of thousands of li, through the Long March of twenty-five thousand li. In the end, Mao Zedong carried it up onto Tiananmen and proclaimed a people's democratic dictatorship guided by Marxism-Leninism.
After ascending Tiananmen, Mao Zedong found the ghost of Marx even more efficacious than he had imagined. He believed himself a cut above Li Zicheng — Li Zicheng had risen as a roving bandit and died as one, while Mao Zedong had risen as a roving bandit but, armed with an ideological weapon, ascended to Tiananmen amid tremendous fanfare, truly becoming a revolutionary mentor and head of state. Back in his depressed days on Jinggang Mountain, though he from time to time invoked the ghost of Marx, what he was really thinking about, again and again, was banditry, peasant organizing, and cobbling together a ragtag army — what did any of that have to do with Marxism? His emphasis on the peasant movement was, in reality, a roving-bandit movement, not the proletariat on which Marxism relies. At that time Mao Zedong regarded himself as an ‘earthbound Communist’ (tu-gong); in ‘On Coalition Government’ and ‘On New Democracy,’ in his language of combining revolution with Chinese realities, and in his heart during the ‘three-thirds system’ implemented in northern Shaanxi, one cannot help but see that Mao Zedong's own thinking was really at work there. But the moment he ascended Tiananmen, he suddenly realized that the light of Marxism-Leninism shone far brighter — that ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ was merely a hodgepodge of borrowings from here and there, and that, lacking real scholarship of his own, he dared not present it to the world; he no longer even dared to speak of borrowing the concept of ‘stages of development of Marxism.’ Meanwhile his mentor Stalin sat in the Kremlin watching Beijing closely. And so the ‘earthbound Communist’ had no choice but to transform himself entirely into a thoroughgoing ‘foreign Communist,’ a thoroughgoing gramophone and robot of Moscow. And so, with redoubled intensity, Marxism-Leninism was proclaimed as China's guiding ideology.
Once Marxism-Leninism was proclaimed China's guiding ideology, every other party was forced to abandon its own political program and submit to the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party. Schools taught Marxist-Leninist education; mass organizations were required to endorse the socialist revolution, with Marxism-Leninism as their guiding thought; even the churches had to endorse the Communist Party, interpreting their own doctrines through Marxism-Leninism; bourgeois elements had to attack the thinking of their own class while praising communism; scholars and writers had to thoroughly criticize their own thought while extolling Marxism-Leninism as the sole truth; scientists had to bend their research findings into compromise with communism; even newborn infants had to acknowledge that their ancestors, three generations back, had been in the wrong — how fortunate to have been born into an age when the truth of Marxism-Leninism shines so brightly!
This whole chorus of parties, organizations, religions, scholars, scientists, and the broad masses of the people, praising Marxism-Leninism and submitting to Communist ideological leadership — their ‘change of heart and face’ did not come about because the spirits of Marx and Lenin possessed their bodies, but because of the effects of the Chinese Communist Party's machinery of repression: the result of more than a dozen great campaigns and countless smaller ones, of bloody struggle sessions, mass struggle meetings, prison vans, shackles, whips, bullets, starvation, unemployment, and the constant persecution of the people by police, secret agents, and informers.
On the Chinese mainland, the work of unifying thought has meant sending police both great and small, secret agents, and informers patrolling everywhere. Whenever any person, party, or organization is found to conflict with Marxist-Leninist thought — and above all, to conflict with Mao Zedong's current policies — calamity follows. On the surface, it is said that mere thought is not a crime; but once a thought is spoken aloud, it can invariably be reinterpreted as a political problem, and political problems are crimes. For as long as a thought remains only in a person's mind, unspoken, it is naturally no crime; but the moment it is spoken, that speaking becomes an act, which can be reinterpreted as conspiracy, spreading rumors, opposing the Party, counterrevolution, or opposing the leadership of Marxism-Leninism — and thus fulfills all the conditions of a crime. That is why, once a thought is found to conflict with Communist thought, calamity follows. And there have indeed been vast numbers of people who suffered for exactly this reason.
It is entirely certain that the Communist Party's monopoly over thought requires the elevation of Marxism-Leninism to sole orthodoxy. It is likewise common knowledge that they oppose every non-Marxist-Leninist thought. But that they push aside every similar strand of thought while reserving especially fierce attacks for certain particular ones — this subtlety is not something everyone fully appreciates.
On the whole, whether looking vertically through history, ancient and modern, or horizontally across countries East and West, anything that does not conform to Marxist-Leninist thought falls, without exception, under the Communist Party's fierce attack and opposition. But the Communist Party is a dialectical materialist, a pursuer of self-interest, a realist — and it opposes the ancient less fiercely than the contemporary, and opposes dissimilar schools less fiercely than kindred ones. How is this to be explained?
I say the Communist Party opposes the ancient less fiercely than the contemporary; to illustrate, the Communist Party's opposition to ancient imperial thought and feudal thought is nowhere near as fierce as its opposition to capitalist thought. They understand perfectly well that imperial and feudal thinking, though it conflicts with Communist thought, belongs to a bygone age; what is dead does not easily come back to life, and now that the world has entered the twentieth century, such things already belong in a museum, with no great need to fight against them. But twentieth-century capitalist thought is its true rival, the very thing whose place it wishes to seize — and so it opposes capitalist thought more fiercely than imperial or feudal thought. This much is easy for most people to understand. But there are two further points that most people fail to grasp. The first is that imperial and feudal thinking, within certain bounds, actually suits the Chinese Communist Party's own taste. For example, the majesty and power of an emperor is something Mao Zedong appropriated for himself and even magnified further; the imperial style of despotism gave him a model, which he then carried to its fullest expression. The second is that feudal morality is also useful to the Communist Party — though the wording has been changed somewhat, the Party demands that its members and the people show it the same loyal submission that slaves and servants once showed their feudal masters. They often use phrases like ‘meritorious servant of the people,’ whose content, comparing present to past, breathes from the very same nostril in its moral outlook. That the Party has recently printed a good many ancient books, and that Mao Zedong in particular approved the reprinting of the Zizhi Tongjian, a manual of imperial statecraft, likewise reveals their real intent.
But why does the Communist Party oppose capitalist thought so fiercely? In theory, the issue concerns relations of production; in reality, it is because modern capitalism has brought people a rich tradition of democratic and free thought — and this is precisely what the Communist Party fears and hates most. Because the Communist Party, from its rhetoric down to its very marrow, is devoted to dictatorship and control, while capitalist thought wields an unassailable weapon of democracy and freedom. And so the Communist Party must fabricate every possible term of attack against capitalist thought, and must define the mere holding of capitalist ideas as a crime in itself. Do not the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party constantly denounce criminals as ‘spokesmen for capitalist countries’? Beria was executed on exactly this charge; on the Chinese mainland, vast numbers of people were labeled Rightists, because during the brief period of the Hundred Flowers Campaign they were permitted to express only the smallest measure of democratic and free thought, and in the end were branded bourgeois Rightists, shot, imprisoned, held for forced self-reflection, or sent down to the countryside for labor reform. This, then, is the further, subtler reason why the Communist Party works so hard against capitalist thought.
I say the Communist Party opposes dissimilar schools less fiercely than kindred ones — what do I mean by this? Open the history of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party, especially the Chinese Communist Party once it held power, and you find they wished to monopolize ‘socialism’ entirely, permitting no other branch to exist alongside their own. And so, toward socialist parties and socialist individuals outside the Communist Party, they regard them as ‘a thorn in the eye, a splinter in the flesh,’ something that must be pulled out for the Party's own satisfaction. Before seizing power, they attacked such rivals fiercely whenever the chance arose; after seizing power, beyond attacking other socialist schools of thought, they slandered them with the ugliest labels and used the power of the state to eliminate people holding other socialist ideas. Take the record of the past nine years as an example: the Chinese Communist Party has found some use even for corrupt officials of the Nationalist era, granting them high positions; but toward those who hold socialist convictions, it has meted out persecution, contempt, and attack. Examples of this are everywhere; such people have been tormented in every single campaign. The persecution and imprisonment of Hu Feng and his friends is a fine example.
This same pattern also holds true within the Communist Party itself. Though members are all, in name, Marxist-Leninists, all believers in communism, whenever factional struggle breaks out, they fight each other to the death, and in the end the stronger faction takes power while the defeated are sent to the execution ground, or driven to death or flight. Beloved comrades in communism become enemies as irreconcilable as fire and water. Or when a Party member's views diverge from those of the leadership, such a person is likewise eliminated, or expelled from the Party. Has the Communist Party not, in recent times, purged so-called Rightist elements? Has it not expelled so-called revisionists?
The Communist Party opposes all non-Marxist-Leninist thought, and, in doing so, opposes the ancient less than the contemporary, and dissimilar schools less than kindred ones — this extreme thought control, traced to its root, still comes down to one single thing: political power. For the sake of power, it loses sight of truth, opposing all non-Marxist-Leninist thought, forcibly imposing ideological uniformity, and eliminating everyone who harbors dissenting thought. For the sake of power, it relaxes its guard against imperial thinking while tightening its grip on capitalist thought, striking at it mercilessly. For the sake of power, it excludes every other progressive strand of thought and faction, above all exterminating, within the Party itself, every ‘comrade’ who refuses to submit to the will of the strongman in charge. This, then, sums up the main fronts on which the Communist Party, having blinded the eyes and ears of the whole world, exerts its full power to control thought. The cruelty and violence displayed on every one of these fronts, applied everywhere without exception, has a universal character. Thought control has become one of the Communist Party's cruelest instruments — and it has crushed the hearts and minds of the broad masses of the people!