(Minghui.org) Of the current human rights violations being committed by the Chinese Communist Party, the persecution of Falun Gong is probably the worst one. There are several reasons behind that.
First, the persecution targets around 100 million Falun Gong practitioners from all walks of life, as well as their family members. Second, the principles of Falun Gong, Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance, are consistent with traditional Chinese culture and fundamentally contradict the core theories of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), namely, deceit, violence, and hatred. Third, the peaceful nature and determination of Falun Gong practitioners shown over the past 21 years of resisting the harsh persecution has provided hope for other religious groups, as well as ordinary citizens, in this unprecedented, totalitarian country.
Still, some people in the West may think the danger of communism is too distant and have not taken it seriously. In fact, we have seen in the coronavirus pandemic and the U.S. general election that communist ideology has crept into the free world in the past few decades, causing real and imminent threats in many areas.
Below is a detailed analysis.
Trevor Loudon, former Vice President of the ACT New Zealand Party, has written several books on international politics. Among them, Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the U.S. Congress has drawn broad attention.
For some readers, the term “progressive” might be more appealing than “liberal,” although many consider it another hat of liberals due to its notoriety. Likewise, despite their similarities, some also think liberals focus on changing society with taxpayers' money while progressives advocate more power for the government to change the social and legal system.
Enemies Within is designed to show American voters exactly how modern communism works and how it impacts your life, every single day. Just how do the communists win big on things like Obamacare and immigration “reform,” which go completely against the wishes of the American people?” writes Loudon in his book.
His research has been cited in many articles, blog posts, and books. Loudon has given countless radio interviews and addressed audiences in more than 30 states in his four tours of the United States.
The 2016 U.S. presidential election was special in recent American history. When Donald Trump appeared to be winning, mainstream media began to launch massive attacks on him. Some people also held protests in many cities and groundlessly labeled Trump a racist and a Nazi. Besides these hateful claims, they demanded vote recounts and threatened to impeach him.
Although these protests were claimed to be “spontaneous,” investigators found they were planned activities. Furthermore, their organizers were closely connected with North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and other authoritarian regimes, according to the documentary America Under Siege: Civil War 2017 by Loudon. In particular, two of these organizations, the Workers World Party (WWP) and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (now Liberation Road) are communist groups.
In his research, Loudon found communists viewed America as a primary target for infiltration and subversion. Approaching the country in various forms, communists have controlled American education and media and infiltrated its politics and businesses. As a result, ideology in the U.S. has gradually shifted toward a communist totalitarian regime over the past several decades.
In other words, as the Cold War ended, people assumed the free world had defeated the communist bloc, moving towards democracy, stability, and prosperity. In reality, communists had secretly seized the West in politics, economy, culture, education, and media, ready for a final, deadly strike.
The CCP influences American society in many ways. Instructed by Jiang Zemin, former Chief Executive of Hong Kong Tung Chee Hwa formed the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF) in 2008 to influence public opinion in the United States to favor China. Through the years, it has brought a large number of U.S. journalists, scholars, and political as well as military leaders to China.
The long-term impact can be enormous. “It’s the ability to privilege certain views over others, to create a platform for someone to speak,” said Peter Mattis of the Jamestown Foundation. “When you have a role in selecting the platform and generating what I presume they hope are some of the bigger reports on U.S.-China relations in the next few years, that’s important.”
Through websites, partnerships, or endowments, the CCP learned to wrap its message in a palatable wrapper of U.S. academics and intellectuals, he explained, “Who better to influence Americans than other Americans?”
In addition to influencing education and scholars, this organization also approached lawmakers and other officials directly. “As a registered foreign agent, in 2016 it spent just under $668,000 on lobbying, hiring the Podesta Group and other firms to lobby Congress on the topic of ‘China-U.S. relations.’ The foundation has spent $510,000 on lobbying to date in 2017,” reported the article.
“Nobody in the 1980s would have represented the Russian government. And now you find so many lobbying for the Chinese government,” remarked Frank Wolf, a retired U.S. representative from Virginia. “I served in Congress for 34 years. I find it shocking.”
To make things worse, not many people know organizations such as CUSEF operate under the CCP’s United Front Department, one of the “magic weapons” that was established in Mao Zedong’s era and continues to this day. It suppresses messages it does not like and amplifies those it does.
“Tung currently serves as the vice-chairman of one of the united front’s most important entities—the so-called Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, which is one of China’s two rubber-stamp assemblies,” wrote the Foreign Policy article.
The silencing effect is unbelievable, from various human rights issues in China to the persecution of Falun Gong, which was launched by Jiang in 1999. In March 2006, witnesses testified about forced organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners in China, which, by then, was supported by a large amount of evidence. Due to the CCP’s massive propaganda and powerful influence, however, U.S. lawmakers have yet to take concrete actions against such an unprecedented crime.
Less than 10 years after China joined the WTO, it became the world’s second-largest economy after the U.S. By then, the CCP’s strategy had shifted from “hiding your capacities and biding your time” to global expansion to advance its communist ideology. This includes the Belt Road Initiative (BRI), Confucius Institutes, massive propaganda, and other approaches.
According to a report released by the Hudson Institute in June 2018, “Russia’s interference and election meddling dominate the headlines and Washington’s attention. But beneath the radar, another country’s interference is expanding, dwarfing Russia’s short-term disruption. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has put enormous resources into influence abroad, estimated at $10 billion a year.”
Michael Pillsbury, director of the Center on Chinese Strategy at the institute, attended a 2018 meeting in Beijing where two former CCP United Front officials asked 80 thinktank experts how to refute a report from the White House that identified the threat from China. Unlike the Wolf Warrior culture in Global Times, tactics created by these experts were well designed. They include claims that China is weak and infested with poverty.
Nonetheless, the U.S. government did take it seriously. The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property released a report in 2017 titled “The Theft of American Intellectual Property: Reassessments of the Challenge and United States Policy,” which estimated that the “annual cost to the U.S. economy continues to exceed $225 billion in counterfeit goods, pirated software, and theft of trade secrets and could be as high as $600 billion.”
Back in 2018, the CCP had already conducted overt and covert influence operations to sway the mid-term elections. “The election interference includes targeting American farmers with propaganda and anti-Trump political activities in states carried by Trump in the 2016 election,” wrote a September 2018 article on Washington Free Beacon titled “China Engaged in Election Influence Operations to Undermine Trump.”
David Stilwell, Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs of the U.S. State Department, spoke in October referring to the CCP’s influence as an “iceberg.” “In recent years the CCP has added 40,000 cadres to the United Front Work Department, making it four times the size of the State Department’s Foreign Service corps. And that’s without counting the other parts of the Beijing Party-state that help shape foreign opinion and influence foreign officials. These include the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Central Propaganda Department, the Ministry of State Security, the Ministry of Education, the International Liaison Department, and the Political Work Department of the People’s Liberation Army,” he said.
There are many affiliated organizations such as Confucius Institutes, diplomats, news media, and state-owned enterprises. “Think of an iceberg. Above the waterline are official PRC diplomats conducting legitimate diplomatic activities, for example. Below the waterline is a far larger, murkier mix of actors and entities whose ties to the Communist Party state have long gone ignored, overlooked, or unstudied,” he explained.
Matthew Pottinger, U.S. deputy national security adviser, has given speeches warning Democratic countries that, upon infiltration through United Front efforts, the CCP would weaponize these overseas activities to achieve its hidden agenda.
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The renowned American writer Mark Twain wrote a story called “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” about a stranger who turned honest townspeople into greedy and deceitful caricatures of themselves with a sack of fake gold.
The American founding fathers knew this could be a crisis one day. “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net,” wrote John Adams. “Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people.”
Inside China, Falun Gong practitioners have been persecuted for 21 years by the most totalitarian regime. And yet, they remain peaceful and determined in the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance because they know that, someday, the righteous will prevail and people would be rewarded for their loyalty to virtue.
That may offer some hints to the situation we are facing right now. As the CCP erodes America and the free world with incentives of short-term material gains and power, people who follow their conscience will be clear on which side to stand, and they will be blessed with a better future.