V. The Great Leap Forward—Creating Falsehoods to Test People’s Loyalty
After the Anti-Rightist Movement, China became afraid of truth. Everyone joined in listening to false words, telling false tales, making up false stories, and avoiding and covering up the truth through lies and rumors. The Great Leap Forward was a nationwide collective exercise in lying. The people of the entire nation, under the direction of the CCP’s evil specter, did many ridiculous things. Both liars and those being lied to were betrayed. In this campaign of lies and ridiculous actions, the CCP implanted its violent, evil energy into the spiritual world of the Chinese people. At the time, many people sang songs promoting the Great Leap Forward, “I am the Jade Emperor, I am the Dragon King. I order the three mountains and five gorges to step aside, here I come.” [5] Policies such as “achieving a grain production of 75,000 kg per hectare,” “doubling steel production,” and “surpassing Britain in 10 years and the US in 15 years” were attempted year after year. These policies resulted in a grave, nationwide famine that cost millions of lives.
During the eighth plenum of the Eighth CCP Central Committee meeting held in Lushan in 1959, who among the participants did not agree with General Peng Dehuai’s [6] view that the Great Leap Forward initiated by Mao Zedong was foolish? However, supporting Mao’s policy or not marked the line between loyalty or betrayal, or the line between life and death. In a story from Chinese history, when Zhao Gao [7] claimed that a deer was a horse, he knew the difference between a deer and a horse, but he purposefully called a deer a horse to control public opinion, silence debates, and expand his own power. The result of the Lushan Plenum was that even Peng Dehuai was forced to sign a resolution condemning and purging himself from the central government. Similarly, in the later years of the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping was forced to promise that he would never appeal against the government’s decision to remove him from his posts.
Society relies on past experience to understand the world and expand its horizons. The CCP, however, has taken away opportunities from the people to learn from historical experience and lessons. The official censorship of the media has only helped further lower people’s capacity to discern good from bad. After each political movement, the younger generations have only been given the Party’s uplifting accounts, but have been deprived of the analyses, ideals, and experiences of the insightful people from older generations. As a result, people have only scattered information as the basis for understanding history and judging new events, thinking themselves correct while deviating thousands of miles from the truth. Thus the CCP’s policy of keeping people ignorant has been carried out thoroughly.
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