The Cultural Revolution was a period full of bloodshed, killings, grievances, loss of conscience, and confusion of right and wrong. After the Cultural Revolution, the CCP leadership changed its banners frequently, as the government changed hands six times within 20 years. Private ownership has returned to China, disparities in the standard of living between cities and rural areas have widened, the desert area has quickly expanded, river water has been drying up, and drug-use and prostitution have increased. All the “crimes” the CCP fought against are now permitted again.
The CCP’s ruthless heart, devious nature, evil actions, and ability to bring ruin to the country increased. During the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, the Party mobilized armies and tanks to kill students protesting on Tiananmen Square. The vicious persecution against Falun Gong practitioners is even worse. In October of 2004, to take land from the peasants, Yulin City of Shaanxi Province mobilized over 1,600 riot police to arrest and shoot more than 50 peasants. The political control of the Chinese government continues to rely on the CCP’s philosophy of struggle and violence. The only difference from the past is that the Party has become even more deceptive.
Law Making: The CCP has never stopped creating conflicts among the people. They have persecuted large numbers of citizens for being reactionaries, anti-socialists, bad elements, and evil cult members. The totalitarian nature of the CCP continues to conflict with all other civil groups and organizations. In the name of “maintaining order and stabilizing society,” the Party has kept changing constitutions, laws and regulations, and has persecuted as reactionaries anyone who disagrees with the government.
In July of 1999, Jiang Zemin made a personal decision, against most other Politburo members’ wills, to eliminate Falun Gong in three months; slander and lies quickly enveloped the country. After Jiang Zemin denounced Falun Gong as an “evil cult” in an interview with the French newspaper La Figaro, Chinese official propaganda followed up by quickly publishing articles pressuring everyone in the country to turn against Falun Gong. The National People’s Congress was coerced into passing a non-descript “decision” dealing with evil cults; soon after that the Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate jointly issued an “explanation” of the “decision.”
On July 22, 1999, the Xinhua News Agency published speeches by the CCP’s Organization Department and Propaganda Department leaders publicly supporting Jiang’s persecution against Falun Gong. The Chinese people became enmeshed in the persecution simply because it was a decision made by the Party. They can only obey orders and dare not raise any objections.
Over the past five years, the government has utilized one-fourth of the nation’s financial resources to persecute Falun Gong. Everyone in the country has had to pass a test; most who admitted to practicing Falun Gong but refused to give up the practice have lost their jobs; some are sentenced to forced labor. The Falun Gong practitioners have not violated any laws, nor have they betrayed the country or opposed the government; they have only believed in “Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance.” Yet hundreds of thousands were imprisoned. While the CCP has enforced a tight blockade of information, more than 1,100 people have been confirmed by their families to have been tortured to death; the true number of deaths is much higher.
News Reporting: On October 15, 2004, Hong Kong-based Wenweipao reported that China’s 20th satellite returned to earth, falling on and destroying the house of Huo Jiyu in Penglai Township, located in Dayin County, Sichuan Province. The report quoted Dayin County government office director Ai Yuqing saying that the “black lump” was confirmed to be the satellite. Ai was himself the on-site deputy director of the satellite recovery project. However, Xinhua News only reported the time of the satellite’s recovery, emphasizing that this was the 20th scientific and technical experimental satellite recovered by China. Xinhua News did not mention a word about the satellite destroying a house. This is a typical example of the Chinese news media’s consistent practice of reporting only the good news and covering up the bad news, as instructed by the Party.
Lies and slander published by newspapers and broadcast on television have greatly assisted the execution of the CCP’s policies in all past political movements. The Party’s command would be instantly executed by the media in the country. When the Party wanted to start an Anti-Rightist Movement, media all over China reported with one voice the crimes of rightists. When the Party wanted to set up the people’s communes, every newspaper in the nation started to praise the superiority of people’s communes. Within the first month of the persecution of Falun Gong, all television and radio stations slandered Falun Gong repeatedly in their prime time broadcasting in order to brainwash people. Since then, Jiang has utilized all media repeatedly to fabricate and spread lies and slanders about Falun Gong. This includes the effort to incite nationwide hatred against Falun Gong by reporting false news about Falun Gong practitioners committing murder and suicide. An example of such false reporting is the staged “Tiananmen Self-Immolation” incident, which was criticized by the NGO International Educational Development as a government-staged action to deceive people. In the past five years, no mainland Chinese newspaper or TV station has reported the truth about Falun Gong.
Chinese people are used to the false news reports. A senior reporter of Xinhua News Agency once said, “How could you trust a Xinhua report?” People have even described Chinese news agencies as the Party’s dog. A folk song has it: “It is a dog raised by the Party, guarding the Party’s gate. It would bite anyone the Party wants it to bite, and bite however many times the Party wants it to.”
Education: In China, education became another tool used to control people. The original purpose of education was to develop intellectuals to have both knowledge and correct judgment. Knowledge refers to the understanding of information, data and historical events; judgment refers to the process of analyzing, investigating, critiquing, and reproducing such knowledge—a process of spiritual development. Those who have knowledge without proper judgment are referred to as bookworms, not true intellectuals with a social conscience. This is why in Chinese history it is the intellectuals with righteous judgment, not those having merely knowledge, who have been highly respected. Under the CCP’s control, however, China is filled with intellectuals who have knowledge but not judgment, or who dare not exercise judgment. Education in schools focused on teaching students not to do things that the Party did not want them to do. In recent years, all schools started to teach politics and CCP history with unified textbooks. The teachers did not believe the content of the text, yet they were forced by the Party “discipline” to teach it against their wills. The students did not believe the text or their teachers, yet they had to remember everything in the text in order to pass the exams. Recently, questions about Falun Gong were included in term and entrance exams for colleges and high schools. Students who do not know the standard answers do not get high scores to enter good colleges or high schools. If a student dares to speak the truth, he will be expelled from school immediately and lose any chance of formal education.
In the public education system, due to the influence of the newspapers and government documents, many well known sayings or phrases have been spread as truth, such as Mao’s quotation “We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports.” The negative effect is widespread: it has poisoned people’s hearts, supplanting benevolence and destroying the moral principle of living in peace and harmony.
In 2004, the China Information Center analyzed a survey done by the China Sina Net, and the results show that 82.6 percent of Chinese youth agreed that one can abuse women, children and prisoners during a war. This result is shocking. But it reflects the Chinese people’s mindset, and especially that of the younger generation, who lack a basic understanding of either the traditional cultural concept of benevolent rule or the notion of universal humanity.
On September 11, 2004, a man fanatically slashed 28 children with a knife in Suzhou City. On the 20th of the same month, a man in Shandong Province injured 25 elementary school students with a knife. Some elementary school teachers forced students to make firecrackers by hand to raise funds for the school, resulting in an explosion in which students died.
Implementing Policies: The CCP leadership has often used threats and coercion to ensure the implementation of their policies. One of the means they used was the political slogan. For a long time, the CCP used the number of slogans posted as a criterion to assess one’s political achievements. During the Cultural Revolution, Beijing became a “red sea” of posters overnight, with the slogan “Down with the ruling capitalists in the Party” everywhere. In the countryside, ironically, the signs were shortened to “Down with the ruling party.”
Recently, to promote the Forest Law, the State Bureau of Forestry and all its stations and forest protection offices strictly ordered a standard amount of slogans to be put out. Not reaching the quota would be treated as not accomplishing the task. As a result, local government offices posted a large number of slogans, including “Whoever burns the mountains goes to prison.” In the administration of birth control in recent years, there have been even scarier slogans such as, “If one person violates the law, the whole village will be sterilized,” “Rather another tomb than another baby,” or, “If he did not have a vasectomy as he should, his house will be torn down; if she did not have an abortion as she should, her cows and rice fields will be confiscated.” There were more slogans that violate human rights and the Constitution, such as “You will sleep in prison tomorrow if you don’t pay taxes today.”
A slogan is basically a way of advertising, but in a more straightforward and repetitive manner. Hence, the Chinese government often uses slogans to promote political ideas, beliefs and positions. Political slogans can also be viewed as words the government speaks to its people. However, in the CCP’s policy-promoting slogans, it is not hard for one to sense the tendency of violence and cruelty.
No comments:
Post a Comment