How China Became a Society Where Everyone Is an Enemy

(Minghui.org) Traditional Chinese culture promotes harmony between heaven, earth, and mankind. The ancient sage Laozi once wrote, “Mankind follows Earth, Earth follows Heaven, Heaven follows the Tao, and the Tao follows nature.”

But this harmony was disrupted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after the regime seized power several decades ago. Through the unprecedented havoc during the Cultural Revolution and comprehensive brainwashing with communist doctrines, Chinese people were cut off from their traditions. The CCP’s core values of class struggle, hatred, and lies gradually turned Chinese society into what it is today.

Everyone Is an Enemy

For a long time, the CCP Constitution specified that class struggle was a leading ideology. Consistent with that, the Party launched one political campaign one after another, including the Three-Antis, the Five-Antis, and the Anti-Rightists campaigns, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.

The CCP-controlled media publicly praised these struggles—even those between family members. For example, the People’s Daily published many articles in 1952 about the Five Antis-Campaign. The titles of some of the articles were, “Wang Shihuan, a Youth League member of Beijing No. 5 Middle School, reported his father’s corruption,” “Xu Dongcai stood up for the people and reported his capitalist father,” and “Family member of a Mentougou Mechanical and Electrical Plant employee boldly reported and persuaded her husband to confess.”

The CCP wanted to mobilize the general public with “a minor political campaign every three years and a major campaign every five years.” It incited people to attack each other through public political posters: students against teachers, lower officials against higher officials, friend against friend, and family members against each other.

One example was Bian Zhongyun, a teacher and official at the Girls’ High School Affiliated with Beijing Normal University. On August 5, 1966, students humiliated her by forcing her to wear a tall hat, hold a blackboard listing her “crimes,” and kneel down. The Red Guards beat her with sticks embedded with nails and poured boiling water over her until she died.

As Fang Zhongmou of Guzhen County, Anhui Province, was talking with her family on February 13, 1970, she criticized Mao Zedong and his supporter Liu Shaoqi. Her eldest son, 16-year-old Zhang Hongbing, wrote a letter reporting her and submitted it with his Red Guard badge to a military representative. Two months later, Fang was arrested and executed as a “counter revolutionary.”

When the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, it left irreparable damage—societal, psychological, and moral. Although the economy improved in the 1980s and 1990s, it is likely that people will never trust others like they used to.

Drama of Palace Intrigue Distorts History

Along with promoting degenerate values, the CCP also promoted materialism and vying for money at any cost. Because of these two trends, hardly anyone remembers traditional values.

In recent years, the CCP has stopped advocating class struggle as a leading ideology, but the theme of promoting struggle has never changed. Many dramas were written to portray—often through fabricated stories—the conflicts that went on in royal palaces in ancient times. One example is The Legend of Zhen Huan, which was popular in China in 2012. Featuring historical figures in traditional dress, the theme was “a good person needs to be worse than a bad person to survive.” A cousin of Puyi, the last emperor in the Qing Dynasty, said the drama was a terrible distortion of the historic facts.

On the surface, it seems that Chinese citizens can choose what they watch on television. But what is available to watch is totally controlled by the CCP Propaganda Department and only stories consistent with the theory of struggle and Marxism can be broadcast. For this reason, many of the young generation in China believe that what is depicted in these dramas is true, and some have even learned how to be more competitive during conflicts.

As it says in the Nine Commentaries of the Communist Party: “Even more despicable than the CCP’s destruction of traditional culture is its intentional misuse and underhanded modification of traditional culture. The CCP has highlighted the vilest events in China’s history, things that occurred whenever people diverged from traditional values, such as vying for power within the royal family, the use of tactics and conspiracy, and dictatorship and despotism. It has used these historical examples to help create the CCP’s own set of moral standards, ways of thinking, and system of discourse. In doing so, the CCP has created the false impression that this ‘Communist Party culture’ is actually a continuation of traditional Chinese culture.”

Inciting a New Wave of Hatred

The CCP has recently been heavily promoting the so-called Fengqiao Experience harking back to the Maoist-era. Beginning with Fengqiao Town in Zhejiang Province in the early 1960s, the CCP instigated local residents to report on each other to the authorities. Needless to say, this is another tactic to direct public anger away from the authorities by inciting hatred among the citizenry.

This is happening on a large scale. According to a November 2021 report, about 140,000 residents (or 5% of the population) of the Chaoyang District in Beijing have been recruited to monitor the general public. The recruits include security guards, retirees, volunteers, courier boys, and white-collar employees. They are on duty on the streets and highways, in public areas, and outside subway stations to target dissidents and minority groups.

The cost is very high. An article from Fazhi Wanbao (Legal Evening News) in 2017 reported that the Chaoyang District paid each recruit 300 to 500 yuan per month for this monitoring. To recruit 140,000 people adds up to 670 million yuan (or US $92 million) per year for the Chaoyang District alone. The expense for the entire city of Beijing or mainland China would be astronomical.

This monitoring has dire consequences. Beijing News reported in October 2023 that, because students were encouraged to recklessly report their teachers, the teachers became very cautious and dared not teach anything that might cause trouble. In the end, the students’ parents will also suffer, since their children won’t get a high-quality education in such a harsh environment.

Tragedies Generation after Generation

In all of its numerous political campaigns, the CCP selects 5% of the population as the target and mobilizes the remaining 95% to attack them. Most people join the crowd because they aren’t being targeted and don’t want to be criticized for lagging behind. What people didn’t expect was that, with so many of these political campaigns, almost everyone would eventually end up being a victim.

This situation became even worse after former CCP leader Jiang Zemin took power in 1989. He ignored moral values and principles and blinded the public with money, sex, and ongoing struggles among themselves. The traditional Chinese meditation practice Falun Gong, with its core principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance, was introduced in China in 1992. But Jiang Zemin and the CCP began suppressing it in 1999 and the persecution of its practitioners has continued for 25 years. Falun Gong practitioners, who believe in being good people, have been detained, tortured, and subjected to forced labor, psychiatric abuse, and even forced organ harvesting.

In summary, the CCP has turned China into a country where people treat each other as enemies and no one cares about others. Only by rejecting the CCP can we safeguard our principles and restore traditional values.