Hatred Instilled in Chinese Citizens’ Minds by the CCP

(Minghui.org) I appreciated the recent article “How China Became a Society Where Everyone Is an Enemy” published on Minghui and read it twice. The article explained how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) destroyed traditional values during the Cultural Revolution.

In fact, the CCP’s damage to the Chinese civilization started well before that. Below are a few examples from my own experience.

When the CCP conquered Chongqing in November1949, I was 10 years old and in the fifth grade. Despite our young age, the CCP brainwashed us, saying that they were at the service of the peasants and workers, while the landlords and capitalists were vicious. They also slandered missionaries, saying that they ate children and many children’s bodies had been found in a well near a nursery founded by missionaries.

Numerous political campaigns took place between 1950 and 1951, including Land Reform, Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries, Purging Counter-revolutionaries, and others. We students were forced to watch people being executed, called “knocking the jar of sand” (meaning that cracking a person’s head open is as easy as breaking a jar). This instilled terror in our young minds.

The schools organized activities for us to attack landlords. A sixth grade student surnamed Xu criticized his father during a school conference, saying that his father, a landlord, was exploiting peasants. I couldn’t understand: how could a child publicly attack his own parents so easily?

During the Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns in 1953, my three sisters and I – all middle school students – were asked by the school to separate ourselves from our families. Officials also spread rumors, saying that we had gold hidden in our house. This didn’t end until all of us searched everywhere for the gold and didn’t find any.

Our school principal often began his speeches with, “My students...” He was publicly denounced for this because “the students belonged to the CCP, not the principal.”

When the so-called Hu Feng Counter-revolutionary Group was targeted in 1955, officials organized the student officers to take turns eavesdropping outside the teachers’ windows to listen for any counter-revolutionary remarks. I listened for two hours, but didn’t hear anything.

After the CCP started the Anti-Rightist campaign in 1957, people were even more scared to report the facts or say what they really thought. This shows how the CCP started stirring up hatred among Chinese citizens long before the Cultural Revolution.

I was misled by the CCP's propaganda and went to the countryside in 1957. People in the countryside were known for their modesty and traditional values. But the CCP’s brainwashing turned them against each other. During the Great Leap Forward in 1958, they were forced to discuss how to follow the Party’s policy day and night. Anyone who dozed off would be reprimanded in public.

There wasn’t enough food during the Great Famine. Officials in Sichuan Province said that each peasant could receive 100 grams of grain (or 3.5 ounces) each day. But even that amount was sometimes reduced.

To prevent starving peasants from cooking things themselves, officials banned private fires. Anyone who started a fire for cooking would be attacked in public, including being beaten and having their feet scalded with boiling water.

As more peasants were starving to death, some dug seeds out of the ground to survive. To stop this from happening, officials soaked bean or pea seeds in urine and planted them together with wood ash. But people were dying of starvation, so some still dug them out to eat. They were often reported to officials, followed by beatings or being humiliated by being paraded through the streets with metal wires piercing through their collarbones.

All these terrible things promoted by the CCP would have been imaginable in the past. But they got even worse and became more common during the Cultural Revolution.