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Partnering with the Chinese Communist Party is Opening Pandora's Box

May 5, 2020 |   By Zheng Yan

(Minghui.org) In China, people used to believe in the harmony of heaven, earth, and man, and they valued virtue and focused on spiritual enlightenment. After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power several decades ago, it replaced traditional culture with violence, hatred, and deceit.

When China opened its doors in the 1970s, Western countries viewed it as an opportunity to help bring democracy to China while reaping economic benefits by partnering with China. The idea of democracy in China turned out to be wishful thinking, but Western countries never stopped trading with China, which enabled China to grow into the second largest economy in the world and to become a global influence, both financially and politically. 

As the coronavirus rages throughout the world, many have begun to see how the CCP's cover-up has turned an epidemic into a global pandemic, and how partnering with the CCP for economic benefits is like opening Pandora's box.

The CCP Is a Cancer

Medical science describes cancer as a progressive disease that might begin with a localized benign tumor to an “early stage cancer” that then invades nearby tissues and eventually spreads to other organs and the entire body. An examination of the CCP's history indicates that, through the years after it took root and grew in China, it has metastasized all over the world.

The CCP was founded in 1921 and modeled after the former Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union carried out the Great Purge in the 1930s (with a death toll of about one million), unknown to the world at the time, the founding CCP members looted wealthy landlords in the countryside and ravaged cities in an action they called “revolution.” Although this ran counter to China’s traditional culture, the short-term gain and greed for power nonetheless attracted a significant portion of Chinese citizens. The CCP cancer, with a genetic material of class struggle and hatred, began to take shape in China and continued to grow in the years that followed. 

During the land reform in the 1950s, the CCP nationalized the land and labeled landlords “enemies of the state.” In the Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns, it seized capital and assets in the cities, labeling business owners “enemies of the state.” In the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the regime successfully forced intellectuals to abandon their values and integrity and yield to the Party unconditionally.

The CCP continued to lie in 1959 during the Great Leap Forward, when it boasted crop production 150 times higher than normal. With the inflated number, farmers were forced to turn in their harvests to the government, which exported most of the crops and left little for domestic consumption. The resulting famine caused about 45 millions deaths between 1959 and 1961 alone.

If that were not enough, then communist leader Mao Zedong launched another wave of campaigns in the mid-1960s to attack traditional Chinese culture. Known as the Cultural Revolution, within a few years, it nearly wiped out the spiritual elements that had inspired Chinese civilization for thousands of years, ranging from literature and art to education and everyday life. 

These tragedies were man-made disasters driven by the CCP's greed for power and wealth. Contrary to what the Chinese people had expected, the country’s land and much of the capital and assets were nationalized and essentially owned by high-ranking Party officials.

While the CCP filled its pockets by looting the “haves,” it prohibited the “have nots” from using the same strategy to gain wealth and challenge its legitimacy. This contradiction shows that the communism theory is fundamentally flawed.

In just a few short decades, the CCP has brought Chinese people hunger (famines such as in 1959-1961), disease (such as the mishandling of SARS and the coronavirus), loss of assets, loss of culture, and death. 

Metastasis to Western Countries

“There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror,” wrote Karl Marx in 1848.

Just how lethal the recipe for communism is probably exceeds what Marx was aware of. Antonov Ovesyenko, whose father led the Bolshevik storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, said the number of people killed as a result of the communist conquest of Russia stood at 100 million. The Khmer Rouge killed 2-3 million people out of Cambodia’s population of 7 million. The CCP was also responsible for more than 80 million unnatural deaths. The killings were not surprising given that communist entities survive and thrive on violence since they terrorize opposing forces to maintain their own power.

This genetic material of communism allows it to multiply. In Marx’s words, it is to “liberate the proletariat and therewith all society,” which in the modern era translates to “multilateral collaboration” for the CCP. More specifically, the current CCP leadership refers to it as the “community of human destiny.” In cancer pathology, that “multiplication” is metastasis.

Motivated by the hope for a better China along with economic incentives, however, Western countries ignored communism’s manufactured tragedies and decided to collaborate with China.

As described in previous articles on Minghui.org, even before the Cultural Revolution ended, then U.S. President Richard Nixon bent his principles and visited China in 1972, followed by the establishment of full diplomatic relations with China in January 1979. With the granting of most-favored-nation (MFN) status, as well as the Agreement on Cooperation in Science and Technology signed in 1979, hundreds of joint research projects and cooperative programs were launched between the two countries.

Although a bill in the U.S. legislature was introduced after the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 to link China’s human rights condition with MFN status, it was rarely enforced, and China’s status was usually unconditionally extended under pressure from U.S. businesses. With help from the U.S. and other Western countries, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 allowed it nearly unlimited access to deliver communist genes to essentially the entire world.

Infiltration and Damage

The CCP has infiltrated the world deeply and comprehensively. 

According to Trading Economics, 19% of U.S. imports come from China, more than any other country. This represented $472 billion in 2019. Similarly, research at Michigan State University showed that New York State imported $23 billion from China in 2018, far beyond any other country, while export to China ranked 8th and was less than $3.5 billion.

This severe trade imbalance has boosted China’s economy and negatively affected manufacturing and resulted in job losses in the U.S. More importantly, it gives China huge leverage to pressure U.S. businesses to influence U.S. policy on China. When Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan visited Beijing in 1994, he told Chinese leaders, “We’re willing to provide as much assistance as we can to your central bank in those technical areas in which we have many years of experience.”

In the past 20-plus years, Wall Street financial groups have encouraged Americans to invest in Chinese businesses while large financial firms underwrite transactions for Chinese firms that trade with the U.S.

In addition, Bloomberg decided to add 364 onshore Chinese bonds to the Barclays Global Aggregate Index over 20 months starting on April 1, 2019. Analysts estimate that full inclusion would attract around $150 billion of foreign inflows into China’s roughly $13 trillion bond market. Later on, MSCI ACWI ex-U.S., one of many equity indexes developed by MSCI (Morgan Stanley Capital International) Inc., announced in November 2019 that it would increase the weighting of China A shares in certain MSCI indexes to up to 20%. Similarly, FTSE Russell, the world's second-largest index company, announced on February 21, 2020, that it would increase Chinese stocks' weighting on equity indexes, echoing the move by MSCI.

Such moves not only affect the stability and national security of the U.S. but also make for uncertainty in ordinary American households. Based on an article in Foreign Policy on January 14, 2020, 55 percent of Americans own stock, with most relying on professionally managed pension funds, mutual funds, and retirement accounts. “Global bond indexes that have started adding Chinese government bonds to their benchmarks... these major shifts in fund allocations could automatically grow U.S. portfolio investment in Chinese companies and government securities to more than $1 trillion by the end of 2021, without the active consent or knowledge of most Americans,” wrote a foreignpolicy.com article titled “Americans Are Investing More in China—and They Don’t Even Know It.”

CCP infiltration into the U.S. also goes deep in propaganda (such as Beijing’s news media outlets in the U.S. as part of its “soft power”), education (such as Confucius Institutes), communities, and organizations (such as the UN and WHO, with the latter viewed as the CCP's puppet in the coronavirus pandemic). For details, refer to a recent review article on Minghui.

European countries have also played a crucial role in helping the CCP to gain power while ignoring its poor human rights record. For example, Spain was the first EU country to have a foreign minister visit Beijing after the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre and later helped to lift the EU arms embargo against China. Spain is a founding member of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and has participated in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) summits, an effort by the CCP to expand globally. In addition, Telefónica, one of the largest telephone operations and mobile network providers in the world, has invested heavily in Huawei’s 5G equipment, while Spain’s help made it possible for the CCP to extend the BRI to Latin America.

Italy is so far the only G7 country to have signed on to the CCP’s BRI, ignoring opinions from its Western partner countries. “The Chinese have essentially bought the port of Piraeus, outside Athens,” reported The New York Times on March 30, 2019. The new deals with China “will now also allow it access to critical Italian ports, like Genoa and another in Trieste, which has a rail link reaching right into the heart of Central Europe.”

When Boris Johnson became the U.K.’s prime minister in July 2019, he said his government would be very “pro-China.” In addition to supporting the CCP’s BRI, he claimed that Britain would be “the most open economy in Europe” for Chinese investments. “Don’t forget [we are] the most open international investment [destination], particularly [for] Chinese investment. We have Chinese companies coming in to do Hinkley, for instance, the big nuclear power plant,” he added. Furthermore, Britain was the first Western country to join the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). 

As the coronavirus spreads from China to the rest of the world, the abovementioned regions were among the hardest hit, despite their geographic distance from China. To chart a safe path forward, it may be time to rethink our relationship with the CCP.

Finding a Solution

In contrast to the 1970s or 1980s, when there still seemed to be hope for openness and democracy in China, today’s incentives for Western countries are largely driven by profits while ignoring China's human rights violations. 

In the U.S. Department of State 2019 Human Rights Report, China was found to be continuing its campaign of mass detention of minorities. “Significant human rights issues included: arbitrary or unlawful killings by the government; forced disappearances by the government; torture by the government; arbitrary detention by the government; harsh and life-threatening prison and detention conditions; political prisoners; arbitrary interference with privacy; substantial problems with the independence of the judiciary; physical attacks on and criminal prosecution of journalists, lawyers, writers, bloggers, dissidents, petitioners, and others as well as their family members; censorship and site blocking; interference with the rights of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, including overly restrictive laws that apply to foreign and domestic...”

This report also mentioned the persecution of Falun Gong, a meditation discipline based on the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. Despite the enormous mental and physical benefits its practitioners have experienced, the CCP has been suppressing the group since July 1999. A large number of practitioners have been detained, imprisoned, and tortured. Some have become victims of the forced organ harvesting.

Despite the suppression of speech and belief in China—as well as omnipresent censorship—Falun Gong is one of the few groups openly safeguarding the freedom of belief.

We may want to take a cue from Falun Gong practitioners and stand up to the CCP's tyranny. Social and economic distancing from the CCP may lead to a path that guides us out of the nightmare of Pandora’s box.