(Clearwisdom.net) The Epoch Times news website published a commentary entitled "The Chinese Communist Party's History of Killing." A few excerpts from the article are reproduced below.
The 55-year history of the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is written with blood and lies. The stories behind this bloody history are not only brutally inhumane but also rarely known. When over 50 million innocent Chinese people have been killed, and many more broken families have been left behind, many people wonder: why does the CCP kill people? While the CCP continues its brutal persecution of Falun Gong practitioners and recently suppressed protesting crowds in Hanyuan with gunshots, people wonder if they will ever see the day when the CCP will learn to speak with words rather than guns.
Mao Zedong summarized the purpose of the Cultural Revolution, "...after the chaos and the world reaches peace, but in 7 or 8 years, the chaos needs to happen again." [1] In other words, every 7 or 8 years, there should be a political movement; every 7 or 8 years, a group of people should be killed.
On the surface, it may appear that the CCP was "forced to kill," and that various incidents in society just so happened to trigger the CCP's comprehensive killing mechanism. In reality, systematic killing is a kind of obligation for the CCP, and these incidents disguise the Party's need to kill. Without these painful lessons, people might begin to get the false impression that the CCP was improving and start to demand democracy like those idealistic students in the 1989 democratic movement. Recurring slaughter every seven or eight years refreshes peoples' memories of terror and can warn the younger generation--whoever works against the CCP, wants to challenge the CCP's absolute leadership, or wants to recover China's cultural history, will get a taste of the "iron fist" of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
To instill the greatest terror, the targets of this destruction were arbitrarily chosen, so that no group felt secure. In every political movement, the CCP used the strategy of genocide. The "suppression of reactionaries" did not suppress the "actions" of the so-called reactionaries, but rather the "members" of the reactionaries. If one had been enlisted and served a few days in the Nationalist (Kuomintang, KMT) army but did absolutely nothing political after the CCP gained power, this person would still be killed because of his "reactionary history." In the process of land reform, in order to remove the root of the problem, besides killing the landowner, the CCP often killed a landowner's entire family.
After 1949, the CCP persecuted more than half the people in China. An estimated 50 million to 80 million people died from unnatural causes. This number exceeds the total number of deaths in both World Wars combined.
In most countries, people show care and love for one another. They hold respect for life and are grateful towards Gods. In the East, people say, "Do not impose on others what you would not have yourself [2]." In the West, people say "Love thy neighbor as thyself [3]." Conversely, the CCP holds that "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles [4]." In order to maintain the "struggles" within society, hatred must be generated between the people. Not only does the CCP take lives, it encourages people to kill each other. It strives to desensitize people towards others' suffering by surrounding them with constant killing. It wants them to become numb from frequent exposure to inhumane brutality, and build the mentality that "the best you can hope for is to avoid being persecuted." All the lessons taught by brutal suppression enable the CCP to maintain its rule.
Besides the destruction of countless lives, the CCP also destroyed the souls of the Chinese people. Many people have already become conditioned to react to the CCP's threats by surrendering all their principles and reasoning. These peoples' souls have died - something more frightening than physical death.
Facts of the Political Campaigns after the Founding of the People's Republic of China compiled by the CCP History Research Center reported that, "In May 1984, after 31 months of intensive investigation, verification and recalculation by the Central Committee, the figures related to the Cultural Revolution were: 4.2 million arrested and investigated, 1.7 million died of unnatural causes, 135,000 people were labeled as counter-revolutionaries and executed, 237,000 people were killed and 7.03 million were disabled in armed attacks, and 71,200 families were destroyed." Statistics compiled from county annals show that 7.73 million people died of unnatural causes.
The beginning of Cultural Revolution triggered a wave of suicides. Many famous intellectuals, including Lao She, Fu Lei, Jian Bozan, Wu Han and Chu Anping ended their own lives at the time.
The Cultural Revolution was the most extreme leftist period. Killing became a competitive way to exhibit one's revolutionary standing, and the means for eliminating "class enemies" was very cruel and brutal.
Everything the CCP does serves only one purpose: gaining and maintaining power. Killing is a very important way for the CCP to maintain its power. The more people killed and the crueler the killings were, the more it could serve its purpose of terrifying people. Such terror started as early as before the Sino-Japanese War.
As the people in China step into the era of computers and space travel, and can talk privately about human rights, freedom and democracy, many people think that the gruesome and disgusting atrocities are all in the past. The CCP has donned civilian clothing and is ready to connect with the world.
But that is far from the truth. When the CCP discovered that there is a group that does not fear its cruel torture and killing, the means they used became even more manic. The group that has been persecuted in this way is Falun Gong.
The Red Guards' violence and cannibalism in Guangxi Province was aimed at eliminating the victim's body, killing someone in several minutes or several hours. Falun Gong practitioners are persecuted to force them to give up their belief in Truthfulness, Compassion, Tolerance. Moreover, the cruel tortures often last for several days, several months or even several years. It is estimated that more than 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners have died as a result of torture.
Falun Gong practitioners who suffered all kinds of torture and escaped from the jaw of death have recorded more than 100 cruel torture methods; the following are only several examples.
Cruel beating is the most commonly used torture method to abuse Falun Gong practitioners. The police and head prisoners directly beat practitioners and also instigate other prisoners to beat practitioners. Many practitioners have become deaf from these beatings, their outer ear tissues have been broken off, their eyeballs crushed, their teeth broken, and their skull, spine, ribcage, collarbone, pelvis, arms and legs have been broken; arms and legs have been amputated due to the beatings. Some torturers have ruthlessly pinched and crushed male practitioners' testicles and kicked female practitioners' genital areas. If the practitioners did not give in, torturers would continue the beating until the practitioners' skin was torn and the flesh gaped open. Practitioners' bodies have become completely deformed from torture and covered in blood, yet the guards have still poured salt water on them and continued to shock them with electric batons. The smells of blood and of burning flesh mixed together, and the screams of agony are miserable. Meanwhile, the torturers also use the plastic bags to cover practitioners' heads in an attempt to make practitioners yield out of fear of suffocation.
Electric shock is another method commonly used in Chinese forced labor camps to torture Falun Gong practitioners. The police have used electric batons to shock the sensitive parts of practitioners' bodies, including the mouth, top of the head, chest, genitalia, hips, thighs, soles of the feet, female practitioners' breasts, and male practitioners' penis. Some police have shocked practitioners with several electric batons simultaneously until burning flesh could be smelled and the injured parts were dark and purple. Sometimes, the head and anus are shocked at the same time. The police have often used ten or even more electric batons simultaneously to beat the practitioners for a long time. Normally an electric baton has a power of tens of thousands of volts. When it discharges, it emits blue light with a static-like sound. When the electric current goes through a person's body, it feels like one is being burned or being bitten by snakes. Every shock is very painful, like a snakebite. The victim's skin turns red, broken, burned and festering. There are even more powerful batons with higher voltage that make the victim feel like his head is being hit with a hammer.
Police also use lit cigarettes to burn practitioners' hands, face, feet soles, chest, back, nipples, and so on. They use cigarette lighters to burn practitioners' hands and genitals. Specially-made iron bars are heated in electrical stoves until they become red-hot. They are then used to burn practitioners' legs. The police also use red-hot charcoal to burn practitioners' faces. The police burned a practitioner to death who, after having already endured cruel tortures, still had a breath and a pulse. The police then claimed his death was a "self-immolation."
Police beat female practitioners' breasts and genital areas. They have raped and gang raped women. They have used electric batons to shock their breasts and genitals. They have used cigarette lighters to burn their nipples, and inserted electrical batons into the practitioners' vaginas to shock them. They have bundled four toothbrushes and inserted them into female practitioners' vaginas and rubbed and twisted the toothbrushes. They have hooked female practitioners' private parts with iron hooks. Female practitioners' hands are cuffed behind their backs, and practitioners' nipples are hooked up to wires through which electric current is run. They have stripped off female practitioners' clothes and thrown them into prison cells filled with male prisoners who have then raped them.
They force Falun Gong practitioners to wear "straight jackets [5]," and then cross and tie their arms behind their backs. They pull their arms up over their shoulders to the front of their chest, tie up the practitioners' legs and hang them outside the windows. At the same time, they gag practitioners' mouths with cloth, put earphones in their ears and continuously play messages that slander Falun Gong. According to an eyewitness account, people who suffer this torture quickly sustain broken arms, tendons, shoulders, wrists and elbows. Those who have been tortured this way for a long time have completely broken spines, and die in agonizing pain.
They also throw the practitioners into dungeons filled with sewage. They hammer bamboo sticks under the practitioners' fingernails and force them to live in damp rooms full of red, green, yellow, white and other molds on the ceilings, floors and walls, which cause their injuries to fester. They also have dogs, snakes and scorpions bite the practitioners, and inject them with nerve-damaging drugs. These are just some of the ways that practitioners are tortured in the labor camps.
In the section "Cruel Struggle within the Party", the article pointed out:
Because the CCP is based on Party principles instead of morality and justice, the loyalty of its members, especially senior officials, to the supreme leader is a central question. Because of this, the Party needs to create an atmosphere of terror by killing its members so the survivors see that when the supreme dictator wants someone to die, that person will die tragically.
The internal fights of Communist Parties are well known. All members of the Politburo of the Russian Communist Party in the first two terms, except Lenin, who had died, and Stalin himself, were executed or committed suicide. Three of the five marshals were executed, three of the five Commanders-in-Chief were executed, all 10 of the secondary army Commanders-in-Chief were executed, 57 of the 85 army corps commanders were executed, and 110 of the 195 division commanders were executed.
Liu Shaoqi, a former Chinese president who was once the No.2 figure in the nation, died tragically. On the day of his 70th birthday, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai [6] specifically told Wang Dongxing (Mao's lead guard) to bring Liu Shaoqi a birthday present, a radio, in order to let him hear the official report of the Eighth Plenary Session of the twelfth Central Committee, which said, "Forever expel the traitor, spy, and renegade Liu Shaoqi from the Party and continue to expose and criticize Liu Shaoqi and his accomplices' crimes of betrayal and treason."
By October 1969, Liu Shaoqi's body had started to rot all over and the infected pus had a strong odor. He was as thin as a rail and on the verge of death. But the special inspector from the central Party committee did not allow him to take a shower or turn over his body to change his clothes. Instead, they stripped off all his clothes, wrapped him in a quilt, sent him by air from Beijing to Kaifeng city, and locked him up in the basement of a solid blockhouse. When he had high fever, they not only did not give him medication, but also transferred the medical personnel away. When Liu Shaoqi died, he was completely out of shape, and had disheveled white hair that was two feet long. Two days later, at midnight, he was cremated as a person with a highly infectious disease. His bedding, pillow and other things that were left behind were all cremated. Liu's death card reads: Name: Liu Weihuang; occupation: unemployed; reason for death: disease.
The CCP tortured the leader of the nation to death like this without even giving a clear reason.
In the section, "Exporting the Revolution, Killing People Overseas", the article wrote:
In addition to killing people within China using all kinds of methods, the CCP also participated in killing overseas Chinese by exporting the "revolution." The Khmer Rouge is a typical example.
Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge only existed for four years in Cambodia. Nevertheless, from 1975 to 1978, more than two million people, including over 200,000 Chinese, were killed in this small country that had a population of only eight million people.
The Khmer Rouge's crimes are countless, but we will not discuss them here. We must, however, talk about its relationship with the CCP.
Pol Pot worshipped Mao Zedong. Beginning in 1965, he visited China four times to listen to Mao Zedong's teachings in person. As early as November 1965, Pol Pot stayed in China for three months. Chen Boda and Zhang Chunqiao discussed with him theories such as "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," "class struggles," "dictatorship of the proletariat," and so on. Later, these became the basis for how he ruled Cambodia. After returning to Cambodia, Pol Pot changed the name of his party to the Cambodian Communist Party and established revolutionary bases according to the CCP's model of encircling cities from the countryside.
In 1968, the Cambodian Communist Party officially established an army. At the end of 1969, it had slightly more than 3,000 people. But in 1975, before attacking and occupying the city of Phnom Penh, it had become a well equipped and brave fighting force of 80,000 soldiers. This was completely due to the CCP's support. The book Documentary of Supporting Vietnam and Fighting with America by Wang Xiangen says that in 1970 China gave Pol Pot armed equipment for 30,000 soldiers. In April 1975, Pol Pot took the capital of Cambodia, and two months later, he went to Beijing to pay a visit to the CCP and listen to instructions. Obviously, if the Khmer Rouge's killing had not been backed by the CCP's theories and material support, it could not have been done.
For example, after Prince Sihanouk's two sons were killed by the Cambodian Communist Party, the Cambodian Communist Party obediently sent Sihanouk to Beijing on Zhou Enlai's orders. It was well known that when the Cambodian Communist Party killed people, they would "even kill the fetus" to prevent any possible troubles in the future. But at Zhou Enlai's request, Pol Pot obeyed without protest.
Zhou Enlai could save Sihanouk with one word, but the CCP did not object to the more than 200,000 Chinese who were killed by the Cambodian Communist Party. At that time, the Chinese Cambodians went to the Chinese embassy for help, but the embassy ignored them.
In May 1998, when a large-scale killing and raping of ethnic Chinese took place in Indonesia, the CCP did not say a word. It did not offer any help, and even blocked the news inside China. It seems that the Chinese government couldn't care less about the fate of overseas Chinese; it did not even offer any humanitarian assistance.
In the section, "The Destruction of Family", the article wrote:
We have no way to count how many people have been killed in the CCP's political campaigns. Among the people, there is no way to do a statistical survey because of information blocks and barriers among different regions, ethnic groups, and local dialects. The CCP government would never conduct this kind of survey, as that would be like digging its own grave. The CCP prefers to omit the details when writing its own history.
The number of families damaged by the CCP is even more difficult to know. In some cases, one person died and the family was broken. In other cases, the entire family died. Even when no one died, many were forced to divorce. Father and son, mother and daughter were forced to renounce their relationships. Some were disabled, some went crazy, and some died young because of serious illness caused by torture. The record of all these family tragedies is very incomplete.
The Japan-based Yomiuri News once reported that over half of the Chinese population has been persecuted by CCP. If that is the case, the number of families destroyed by the CCP is estimated to be over 100 million.
Zhang Zhixin has become a household name due to tons of reportage on her stories. Many people know that she suffered physical tortures, gang rape and mental torture. Finally, she was driven insane and shot to death after her throat was cut. But many people may not know there is another cruel story behind this tragedy--even her family members had to attend a "study session for the families of death row inmates."
Zhang Zhixin's daughter Lin Lin recalled that in the early spring of 1975,
A person from Shenyang Court said loudly, "Your mother is a real die-hard counterrevolutionary. She refuses to accept reform, and is incorrigibly obstinate. She is against our great leader Chairman Mao, against the invincible Mao Zedong Thought, and against Chairman Mao's proletariat revolutionary direction. With one crime on top of another, our government is considering increasing the punishment. If she is executed, what is your attitude?" I was astonished, and did not know how to answer. My heart was broken. But I pretended to be calm, trying hard to keep my tears from falling. My father had told me that we could not cry in front of others, otherwise we had no way to renounce our relationship with my mother. Father answered for me, "If this is the case, the government is free to do what it deems necessary."
The person from court asked again, "Will you collect her body if she is executed? Will you collect her belongings in prison?" I lowered my head and said nothing. Father answered for me again, "We don't need anything."... Father held my brother and me by the hands and we walked out of the county motel. Staggering along, we walked home against the howling snow storm. We did not cook; father split the only coarse corn bun we had at home and gave it to my brother and me. He said, "Finish it and go to bed early." I lay on the clay bed quietly. Father sat on a stool and stared at the light in a daze. After a while, he looked at the bed and thought we were all asleep. He stood up, gently opened the suitcase we brought from our old home in Shenyang, and took out mother's photo. He looked at it and could not hold back his tears.
I got out of bed, put my head into father's arms and started crying loudly. Father patted me and said, 'Don't do that, we cannot let the neighbors hear it.' My brother woke up after hearing me cry. Father held my brother and me tightly in his arms. This night we did not know how many tears we shed, but we could not cry freely. [7]
One university lecturer had a happy family, but his family encountered a disaster during the campaign to correct the earlier anti-rightist movement. At the time of the anti-rightist movement, the person who would become his wife was dating someone who was labeled a rightist. That person was later sent to a remote area and suffered greatly. Because the young girl could not go along, she gave him up and married the lecturer. When her beloved finally came back to their hometown, the woman, now a mother of several children, had no way to repent her betrayal in the past. She insisted on divorcing her husband in order to redeem her guilty conscience. By this time, the lecturer was over 50-years old; he could not accept the sudden change and went insane. He stripped off all his clothes and ran all over to look for a place to start a new life. Finally, his wife left him and their children. The painful separation decreed by the Party is a problem that can't be solved and an incurable social disease that could only replace one separation with another separation.
Family is the basic unit of the Chinese society. It is also the traditional culture's last defense against the Party culture. That is why damage to the family is the cruelest in the CCP's history of killing.
Because the CCP monopolizes all social resources, when a person is classified as being on the opposing side of the dictatorship, he or she will immediately face a crisis in livelihood, be accused by everyone in society, and stripped of his or her dignity. The family is the only safe haven for these innocent people. But the CCP's policy of implication kept family members from comforting each other; otherwise, they too risked being labeled opponents of the dictatorship. Zhang Zhixin was forced to divorce. For many people, family members' betrayal--reporting on, fighting, publicly criticizing, and/or denouncing them--is the last straw that breaks their spirit. Many people have committed suicide as a result.
In the section, "The Patterns and Consequences of Killing", the article summarizes:
(1) The CCP's Ideology of Killing
The CCP has always touted itself as being talented and creative in its development of Marxism-Leninism, but the truth is that the CCP creatively developed an unprecedented evil in history and around the world. It uses the communist ideology of ultimate harmony to deceive the public and intellectuals, uses the industrial revolution to destroy belief and promote complete atheism, uses communism to deny private ownership, and uses Lenin's theory and practice of violent revolution to rule the country. At the same time, it combined and further reinforced the most evil part of Chinese culture that is against mainstream Chinese traditions.
The CCP invented a complete theory and operating structure of "revolution" and "constant revolution" under the dictatorship of the proletariat; it used this system to change society and ensure the party dictatorship. Its theory has two parts--economic base and superstructure (the culture of the ruling class) under the dictatorship of the proletariat. According to its theory, the economic base decides the superstructure, but the superstructure can in turn act on the economic base. In order to strengthen the superstructure, especially the Party's regime, it must first start the revolution from the economic base, which includes:
(1) Killing the landowners to solve the relations of production [8] in the countryside, and
(2) Killing the capitalists to solve relations of production in cities.
At the superstructure level, killing is also repeatedly carried out to maintain the party's absolute control in ideology. This includes:
(1) Solving the problem of intellectuals' political attitude toward the Party.
The CCP has repeatedly launched campaigns to reform the thoughts of the intellectuals. They have accused intellectuals of bourgeois individualism, bourgeois ideology, super-political opinion, super-class ideology, liberalism, etc. The CCP stripped intellectuals of their dignity through brainwashing them and eliminating their conscience. The CCP eliminated the independent thinking and many other good qualities of the intellectuals, such as speaking out for justice, and devoting one's life to justice, so as not "to be moved by poverty, thwarted by violence, nor indulged by wealth... [9]" "One should be the first to worry for the future of the state and the last to claim his share of happiness [10]," "Every ordinary man shall hold himself responsible for his nation's success and failure [11]," and "a gentleman should do good to his nation when wealthy, and should perfect himself when poor."
(2) Launching a cultural revolution and killing people in order to gain the CCP's absolute cultural and political leadership.
The CCP first started with mass campaigns inside and outside the Party, and began killing in the areas of literature, art, theatre, history and education. At first, the CCP killed several famous people such as the "Three-Family Village [12]," Liu Shaoqi, Wu Han, Lao She, and Jian Bozan. Later, the number of people killed increased to "a small group inside the Party" and "a small group inside the army," and finally the killing escalated to the stage that all the people around the country including inside the Party and army were killing each other. Armed fighting eliminated the enemy physically; cultural attacks killed the enemy mentally. It was an extremely chaotic and violent period under the CCP's control. The evil side of human nature had been amplified to the maximum by the Party's needs to revive its power in a crisis. Everyone could arbitrarily kill under the name of "revolution" and "defending Chairman Mao's revolutionary line." That was an unprecedented nationwide practice of eliminating human nature.
(3) CCP's Tiananmen Massacre on June 4th 1989 in order to resolve the democratic demands following the Cultural Revolution
This was the first time that the CCP army killed civilians publicly in order to suppress the peoples' protest of embezzlement, corruption and collusion between government officials and businessmen, and their demand for freedom of press, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly. During the Tiananmen Massacre, the CCP even staged scenes of people burning military vehicles and killing soldiers in order to instigate hatred between the army and civilians, which led to the tragedy of the People's Army massacring its people.
(4) Killing people with different beliefs
Controlling belief is the lifeline of the CCP. In order to let its heresy deceive people for the time being, the CCP started to eliminate all religions and belief systems at the beginning of its rule. When facing a spiritual belief in a new era--Falun Gong--the CCP took out its butcher's knife again. The CCP started the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners by taking advantage of Falun Gong's principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Tolerance and the fact that practitioners do not lie, do not use violence, and will not cause social instability. After gaining experience in persecuting Falun Gong, the CCP made itself better able to eliminate people of other faiths. This time, Jiang Zemin and the CCP themselves came to the front of the stage to kill instead of utilizing other people or groups.
(5) Killing people in order to hide the truth
The people's right to know is another weak point of the CCP; it also kills people in order to block information. In the past, "listening to the enemy's radio broadcasting" was a felony that could send people to prison. Recently, in response to multiple incidents of the interception of the state-owned satellite or cable television system aiming at clarifying truth of the persecution of Falun Gong, Jiang Zemin sent down the secret order to "kill instantly without mercy." Liu Chengjun, who carried out such an interception, was tortured to death. The CCP has mobilized the '610 Office' (an organization similar to the Gestapo in Nazi Germany that was created to persecute Falun Gong), the police, prosecutors, courts and a massive Internet police system to monitor people closely.
(6) The Party seeking its own interests through taking away the right to life
The CCP's theory of continuous revolution actually means it will never give up its power. Currently, embezzlement and corruption inside the CCP have developed into conflicts between the Party's absolute leadership and peoples' right to life. When people organize to legally protect their rights, the CCP uses violence, waving its butcher's knife toward so-called "leaders" of these movements. The CCP has already prepared over one million armed police for this purpose. Today, the CCP is much better prepared for killing than it was at the time of the Tiananmen Massacre on June 4th 1989, when it had to temporarily mobilize its military force. However, while forcing its people into a dead end, the CCP has also forced itself into a dead end. The CCP has come to such an extremely vulnerable stage that it even "takes trees and grass as enemies when the wind blows," as the Chinese saying goes.
We can see from above that the CCP is an evil specter in nature. No matter how it changes in different times and different places, the CCP killed people before, is killing people now, and will continue to kill in the future in order to maintain absolute control.
(2) Different Killing Patterns under Different Circumstances
1. Propaganda Prior to Action
The CCP has used many different ways to kill people depending on the period of time. In most situations, the CCP created propaganda before actually killing anyone. The CCP would then say "only killing could relieve the public's indignation," as if people had requested the CCP to kill. In fact, the CCP instigated the public's indignation.
For example, the drama "White Haired Girl" [13], which totally distorts a folk legend, was used as a tool in propaganda campaigns. The stories of rent collection and water dungeons told in the drama, "Liu Wencai," are fabricated too. The purpose of these false stories is to "educate" people to hate landowners. The CCP commonly demonizes their enemies, even China's leader. In particular, the CCP staged a self-immolation incident on Tiananmen Square in January 2001 to incite people to hate Falun Gong, and then redoubled their massive genocidal campaign against Falun Gong. Not only has the CCP not changed its ways of killing people, but instead has perfected them by employing new information technology. The CCP could only deceive Chinese people in the past, but now it also deceives people around the world.
2. Instigating the Masses to Kill People
The CCP not only kills people through the mechanism of its dictatorship, but also provokes people to kill each other. Even if CCP had some regulations when it began to persecute and kill, by the time it incited people to join in, nothing could stop the slaughter. For example, when the CCP was carrying out its land reform, they allowed any local land reform committee to willfully execute landowners.
3. Destroying One's Spirit before Killing His Physical Body
Another pattern is to crush one's spirit before killing the human body. In China's history, even the leaders of the most cruel and ferocious dynasty in China's history, the Qin (221 -- 207 BC), never destroyed people's spirits. The CCP has never given people the chance to die like a martyr. They promulgated policies such as lightening the sentences of those who offered concessions, making them stricter for those who resisted, and "lowering one's head to admit the crime is the only way to survive." The CCP forces people to give up their own thoughts and beliefs, making them die without dignity. Those who died with dignity would encourage more followers. Only when people die in a humiliating and shameful way can the CCP achieve its purpose of controlling people. The reason that the CCP persecutes Falun Gong with extreme cruelty and ferocity is that Falun Gong practitioners consider their beliefs more important than their lives. When the CCP was unable to destroy their dignity, it did everything it could to destroy them physically.
4. Killing People by Alliances and Alienation
When killing people, the CCP would use both the carrot and the stick by befriending and alienating people. The CCP always tries to attack a small portion of the population, around 5 percent. The CCP considers the majority of the population to be good and only needing to be "educated." We can divide the CCP's educational methods into two parts: education through terror, and education through kindness. Education through terror uses fear to show people that those who oppose the CCP will come to no good end, making them stay far away from those previously attacked by the Party. Education through kindness lets people see that if they can earn the trust of the CCP and stand in alliance with the CCP, they will not only be safe but also have a good chance to be promoted or gain other benefits. Lin Biao [14] once said, "A small portion [suppressed] today and a small portion tomorrow, soon there will be a large portion in total." Those who rejoiced surviving one movement often became victims of the next.
5. Nipping Potential Threats in the Bud and Secret Extra-Judicial Killings
Recently the CCP has developed the killing pattern of nipping problems in the bud and killing secretly outside the law. For example, as workers' strikes or peasants' protests become more common, the CCP eliminates the movements before they can grow by arresting the "ringleaders" and sentencing them to severe punishment. As freedom and human rights become the common understanding and trend throughout the world, the CCP doesn't sentence any Falun Gong practitioner to the death penalty. However, under Jiang Zemin's instigation of "no one is responsible for killing Falun Gong practitioners," Falun Gong practitioners have tragically been killed all over the country. Although the Chinese Constitution stipulates the citizens' right of appeal, the CCP uses plainclothes policeman or hires local thugs to stop, arrest and send appellants back home, sometimes even putting them into labor camps.
6. Killing One Person to Warn Others
The persecutions of Zhang Zhixin, Yu Luoke and Lin Zhao are all such examples. [15]
7. Using Suppression to Conceal the Truth of Killing
Famous people with international influence are usually suppressed, but not killed. The purpose of this is to conceal the killing of those who have no influence or power and whose deaths will not draw public attention. For example, during the campaign of suppressing the reactionaries, the CCP did not kill high-ranking generals such as Long Yun, Fu Zuoyi and Du Yuming, instead killing lower level KMT officers and soldiers.
The CCP's use of killing over a long period of time has distorted the Chinese people's souls. Now, in China, many people have the tendency to kill. When terrorists attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001, many Chinese people cheered the attacks on Mainland Chinese Internet message boards. Advocates of "unrestricted war" against the U.S. and the Western bloc were everywhere, making people tremble with fear.
The article "The Chinese Communist Party's History of Killing" concludes:
Due to the CCP's information blockade, we have no way of knowing exactly how many people have died from the various movements of persecution that occurred during its rule. Over 50 million people died in the movements listed above alone. In addition, the CCP also killed people of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Yunnan and other places; information on these incidents is difficult to unearth.
Besides those who have died, we have no way of knowing how many people became disabled, mentally ill, enraged, depressed, or frightened to death through the persecution they suffered. Every single death is a tragedy that leaves deep scars on the souls of the victims' family members.
As the Japan-based Yomiuri News once reported, the Chinese central government's survey of all 29 provinces and direct-administrated cities at that time [16] showed that about 600 million people were direct victims or negatively affected by the Cultural Revolution, comprising roughly half of China's population.
Stalin once said, "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of one million is a statistic." When told that many people starved to death in Sichuan province, Li Jingquan, the former Sichuan Province Communist Party Secretary, remarked, "Which dynasty didn't have people die?" Mao Zedong said that "Casualties are inevitable for any struggle. Death happens often." This is the atheist communists' view on life.
Evil cults sacrifice people and use their blood to worship evil specters. Since its beginnings, the communist party has continued to kill people--when it couldn't kill those outside the Party, it would even kill its own people--to commemorate its "class struggles," "inter-party struggles," and other fallacies. It even put its own party general secretary, chief of the military, generals, ministers and others on the sacrificial altar of its evil cult.
Many think we should give the CCP time to reform itself, saying that it is quite restrained in its killings now. First of all, killing one person still makes one a murderer. From a wider perspective, because killing is one method for the CCP to govern its terror-based regime, the CCP kills as few or as many as necessary to maintain power. The CCP's actions are unpredictable. When people lack a strong sense of fear, the CCP could kill more to increase their sense of terror; when people are already fearful, killing a few could maintain the sense of terror; when people can't control their fear, announcing its intention to kill, with no need to really kill people, would be enough for the CCP to maintain terror. After having experienced countless political killing movements, people have formed a conditioned reflex response to the CCP's terror, and there is no need to even mention killing. Even the propaganda machine's use of mass criticism is enough to bring back people's memories of terror.
Whenever people's sense of terror changes, the CCP will adjust the intensity of its killing. The number killed in and of itself is not the goal; the key is the consistency in its killings. The CCP has not become gentler and neither has it let go of its butcher's knife. It is the people who have become more obedient. Once the people stand up to request something that goes beyond the tolerance of the CCP, the CCP will not hesitate to kill.
Out of the need to maintain terror, random killing gives the maximum result to achieve this goal. In various large-scale historic movements, the identity, crime, and sentencing standard for victims were kept intentionally vague. To avoid being killed themselves, people would often restrict their speech and actions to "safe" levels. These restrictions even exceeded those that the CCP themselves placed on people. That's why in every movement, people tend to act "rather leftist than rightist," following the will of the government, and participate in the movements at the local level. Because every level of government officials wanted to expand the movement to ensure their own safety, the lower the level, the crueler the campaign became. Such society-wide voluntary intensification of terror stems from the CCP's random killings.
In its long history of killing, the CCP has metamorphosed itself into a depraved serial killer. Through killing, it satisfies its perverted sense of the ultimate power of deciding people's life and death. Through killing, it eases its own innermost fear. Through killing, it suppresses social unrest and dissatisfaction caused by its earlier murders. Today, the compounded bloody debts of the CCP have made a benevolent solution impossible. It can only rely on intense pressure and totalitarian rule to maintain its existence until its final moment. Despite occasionally disguising itself through redressing its murder victims, the CCP's bloodthirsty nature has never changed. It will be even less likely to change in the future.
December 23, 2004
Notes:
[1] Mao Zedong's letter to his wife Jiang Qing (1966).
[2] The Analects of Confucius.
[3] Leviticus 19:18.
[4] Marx, Communist Manifesto (1848).
[5] The Strait Jacket is a jacket-shaped torture implement. The victim's arms are twisted and tied with a rope on the back and then pulled to the front from over the head; this torture can instantly cripple one's arms. After that, the victim is forcefully put into the Strait Jacket and hung up by the arms. The most direct consequence of this cruel torture is the fracture of the bones in the shoulder, elbow, wrist, and back, causing the victim to die due to unbearable pain. Several Falun Gong practitioners have died from this torture. Visit the following links for more information:
Chinese: http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2004/9/30/85430.html
English: http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2004/9/10/52274.html
[6] Zhou Enlai (1898-1976) was second in prominence to Mao in the history of the CCP. He was a leading figure in the CCP and Premier of the People's Republic of China from 1949 until his death.
[7] Laogai Research Foundation October 12, 2004 report: http://www.laogai.org/news2/newsdetail.php?id=391 (in Chinese).
[8] One of the three tools (means of production, modes of production and relations of production) that Marx used to analyze social class. Relations of production refers to the relationship between the people who own productive tools and those who do not, e.g., the relationship between landlord and tiller or the relationship between capitalist and worker.
[9] From Mencius.
[10] By Fan Zhongyan (989-1052), prominent Chinese educator, writer and government official from the Northern Song Dynasty. This quote was from his poem, "Climbing the Yueyang Tower."
[11] By Gu Yanwu (1613-1682), an eminent scholar of the early Qing Dynasty.
[12] Three-Family Village was the pen name of three writers in the 1960s, Deng Kuo, Wu Han and Liao Mosha. Wu was the author of a play, "Hai Rui Resigning from His Post," which Mao considered a political satire about his relationship with General Peng Dehuai.
[13] White Haired Girl was originally about a female immortal and had nothing to do with class conflicts. Under the pens of the CCP writers, however, it was transformed into a "modern" drama, opera, and ballet used to incite class hatred.
[14] Lin Biao (1907-1971), one of the senior CCP leaders, served under Mao Zedong as a member of the Politburo, as Vice Chairman (1958) and Defense Minister (1959). Lin is regarded as the architect of China's Great Cultural Revolution. Lin was designated as Mao's successor in 1966 but fell out of favor in 1970. Sensing his downfall, Lin reportedly became involved in a failed coup and attempted to flee to the USSR once the alleged plot was exposed. His plane crashed in Mongolia on his flight from prosecution, resulting in his death.
[15] Zhang Zhixin was an intellectual who was tortured to death by the CCP during the Great Cultural Revolution for criticizing Mao's failure in the Great Leap Forward and being outspoken in telling the truth. Prison guards stripped off her clothes many times, handcuffed her hands to her back and threw her into male prison cells to let male prisoners gang rape her until she became insane. The prison feared she would shout slogans when she was being executed, so they cut off her throat before her execution. Yu Luoke and Lin Zhao were two other intellectuals who died in the Cultural Revolution for persecution of similar nature.
[16] China has since added Hainan to its list of provinces and Chongqing as a direct-administration city of the central government, bringing the total to 31.
