(Minghui.org) Some people in Western society have a misunderstanding about communism's ideology of abolishing private property and achieving egalitarianism. After all, what's wrong with having equal opportunities for everyone?
Looking at the history of communism, however, one will find that violent revolution was often used to seize private property to benefit privileged high-ranking officials and their families. The so-called “egalitarianism” is just an empty promise made by communists.
As more people have come to recognize the harm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the coronavirus pandemic, it would be helpful to review what the CCP has done since it came to power several decades ago, including seizing private property, destroying traditional Chinese culture, and killing innocent citizens.
Seizing private property is an inherent nature of the CCP that started in its early days. For example, the CCP issued orders in the 1930s to kill the landlords, burn their houses, and take their property, wrote Gong Chu, a senior CCP official at the time. Unable to tolerate the brutality anymore, he defected in 1935.
Killing the landlords in the countryside was very cruel. “Officials would first torture these landlords with all kinds of methods to extort money and then kill them—even young children would not be spared,” Gong explained, “The word ‘humanity’ does not exist in the dictionary of the CCP.”
Following the Cultural Revolution, then communist leader Deng Xiaoping launched a new initiative, “Let some people get rich first,” which turned out to benefit the most offspring of the high-ranking officials. Chen Yun, then second most powerful CCP official, and others agreed on a deal: one of each top officials’ children would inherit high power while the other children would be allowed to make money by using their political connections without worrying about corruption charges.
This deal, hardly known to ordinary citizens, quickly enabled high-ranking officials and their families to accumulate assets. Zhou Yongkang, secretary of the Political and Legal Affairs Committee (2007-2012), was reported to own a fortune of 90 billion yuan (or $14 billion) in 2012. The family of Jiang Zemin, former Party secretary, was reported to have overseas assets of about 500 billion yuan (or $70 billion).
According to an “Annual Report on the People's Livelihood Survey in China (2015)” published by Beijing University, the wealthiest 1% of Chinese families owned about one-third of the country’s assets, while the bottom 25% only owned 1% of the assets.
A large portion of such asset redistribution was driven by the kinship. Deutsche Welle, a German public radio, reported in April 2012 that 2,900 Chinese princelings owned a fortune of about 2 trillion yuan (or $320 billion at that time). They dominated many industries, especially finance, foreign trade, and real estate. “Among 3,220 Chinese people with fortunes of over 100 million yuan, only 288 are not offspring of high officials,” wrote the report.
The traditional Chinese culture focuses on the harmony between heaven, earth, and man. The communism theory, on the other hand, promotes class struggle. To further penetrate this ideology in China, the CCP launched numerous political campaigns to pit one group of people against another group.
This was clearly seen during the Cultural Revolution, a havoc between 1966 and 1976. According to Secret archives about the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi, during a meeting in 1974, major officials in Guangxi Province met and discussed how to intensify the political campaigns. In addition to government officials from all cities in Guangxi, military officials and propaganda department chiefs also attended the meeting.
Besides traditional brainwashing techniques such as promoting the communist ruling and cultural revolution, officials also proposed a series of steps: first was digging out an individual’s deviation from the official propaganda, second was charging such individuals with grave crimes with fabricated evidence, and third was attacking the traditional Chinese culture books people were familiar with.
In Nanjing, the capital city of Guangxi, about 18,000 people were involved in discussing how to implement such policies. Among them, over 2,600 study groups were formed with participants of over 74,500. In addition to over 2,700 articles, more than 2,000 speeches were given with an attendance of nearly 250,000 people.
Even young children were ordered to participate. In one elementary school alone, there were 74 student storytellers who targeted Confucian and other traditional Chinese culture.
The lies were accompanied with brutality. According to historian Yan Lebin, about 140,000 people were killed in Guangxi Province alone in the Cultural Revolution. Wei Guoqing, Party secretary of Guangxi Province, once said that the death toll was about 150,000 in Guangxi.
Such brutality remains largely unknown to ordinary citizens because of the CCP’s intense censorship as well as its massive internet army that dominates public opinions. In addition to paid staff, about 10 million volunteers were recruited to monitor the internet according to BBC News on April 7, 2015. Citing a document from the Youth League [2015-9], a junior organization of the CCP, about 4 million of these volunteers were college students.
In addition to seizing private property, ruining culture, and killing innocent citizens, the CCP has also launched various persecution of different faith groups. Among them, the largest and worst one is the suppression of Falun Gong.
In July 1999, then CCP leader Jiang Zemin launched a nationwide campaign against Falun Gong. He mobilized the state propaganda apparatus to defame Falun Gong, all the while ordering the detention, torture, and brainwashing of practitioners, in an attempt to force them to renounce their belief in the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. The propaganda penetrated almost all professions in society especially news media and education systems as well as overseas propaganda.
In China there are about 2,000 newspapers, 8,000 magazines, 1,500 radio and television stations, plus countless websites. Under the strict censorship and powerful internet army, nearly all their contents are manipulated to carry only messages that the CCP wants people to hear.
People’s Daily, a major official newspaper from the CCP, carried 347 articles within one month after the persecution of Falun Gong started, which translates into over 11 articles per day on average.
Chinese Central Television (CCTV), the official television station from the CCP, produced 332 programs that defamed Falun Gong between April 2002 to the end of 2003 alone.
In addition, a large number of movies, posters, books, DVDs, and countless pamphlets were produced to mislead the public.
Besides news media, the education system is another area that the CCP focuses on during the campaign. Chen Zhili, Minister of Education, issued orders for higher education to conduct research to further censor and manipulate online information related to Falun Gong.
During a campaign on February 6, 2001, about 8 million young people from 100 major cities put up 500,000 posters and distributed over 10 million materials that falsely portrayed Falun Gong. Later that month, officials pushed out the staged self-immolation incident to defame Falun Gong, which was included in textbooks and many educational materials since then to slander innocent practitioners.
It was reported that since 2001 Sichuan Province allocated about one million yuan per year dedicated to research on brainwashing strategies against Falun Gong. As such efforts were rolled out to more places across China, thousands of forums were held for defamatory propaganda.
Outside China, the CCP has invested enormously to own or manipulate both Chinese media and Western media. Back in 2001, a report from The Jamestown Foundation found the regime had controlled either directly or indirectly, four major Chinese newspapers overseas.
To push its propaganda around the globe, the CCP also ramped up its influence on television broadcasting through satellite. During a hearing at U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs on April 6, 2011, it was revealed that, “CCTV-4 alone is on 26 satellites around the world, 8 of them are over North America.”
As the CCP increased traditional news media infiltration to Western society, it has also pushed more propaganda through social media platforms such as WeChat or TikTok while censoring information related to topics like Falun Gong, wrote a report from Freedom House in 2020 titled “The Expansion of Chinese Communist Party Media Influence since 2017”.