Extend Class Struggle to Nature
Jin Xunhua was a 1968 high school graduate from the Wusong No.2 Middle School of Shanghai and a member of the Standing Committee of the Middle School Red Guards in Shanghai. He was sent down to the countryside of Heilongjiang Province in March, 1969. On August 15, 1969, fierce floods rushed down from a mountain range and soon inundated the areas surrounding the Shuang River. Jin jumped into the swift currents in order to retrieve two drifting electric wire poles for his production team and was drowned.
The following are two diary entries [14] of Jin before he died.
July 4I am beginning to feel the severity and intensity of the class struggle in the countryside. As a red guard of Chairman Mao, I stand fully prepared to fight head on against the reactionary forces with the invincible Mao Zedong Thought as my weapon. I’m willing to do that even if it means I have to sacrifice my life. I will fight, fight, and fight to the best of my ability to consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat.
July 19
The class enemies in that production brigade are still arrogant. Educated youth came to the countryside precisely to participate in the three major revolutionary movements in the countryside. First and foremost, the class struggle. We should rely on the class of poor and the lower-middle peasants, mobilize the masses and suppress the arrogance of the enemies. We educated youth should always uphold the great banners of Mao Zedong Thought, never forget the class struggle, and never forget the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Jin went to the countryside with the thought of fighting heaven and earth and reforming humanity. His diaries reveal that his mind was full of “fights.” He extended the idea of “struggling with humans” to fighting with heaven and earth, and eventually lost his life for it. Jin is a typical case of the philosophy of struggle and, at the same time, undoubtedly became its victim.
Engels once said that freedom is the recognition of inevitability. Mao Zedong went on and added “and the reformation of the world.” This final touch fully brought to light the CCP’s view of nature, namely, to change nature. The “inevitability” as understood by the communists is the matter out of their eyesight and the “pattern” whose origin is beyond their exposition. They believe that nature and humanity can be “conquered” by mobilizing subjective human consciousness to understand objective laws. The communists have made a mess of both Russia and China, their two pilot fields, in their efforts to change nature.
The folk songs during the Great Leap Forward show the arrogance and stupidity of the CCP: “Let the mountains bow and let the rivers step aside”; “There’s no Jade Emperor in the heaven and there’s no Dragon King on the earth. I am the Jade Emperor and I am the Dragon King. I order the three mountains and five gorges to step aside, here I come!” [15]
The Communist Party has come! So with it comes the destruction of balance in nature and the originally harmonious world.
Disrupting Nature Causes the CCP to Reap What It Has Sown
Under its agricultural policy of keeping the grain as a key link, the CCP at will converted to farmland large areas of mountain slopes and grasslands that were unsuitable for farming, and filled rivers and lakes in China to make cropland. What was the result? The CCP claimed that the grain production in 1952 exceeded that of the Nationalist period, but what the CCP did not reveal was that not until 1972 did the total grain production in China exceed that of the peaceful Qianlong Reign of the Qing Dynasty. Even up to this day, China’s per capita grain production is still far below that of the Qing Dynasty, and is a mere one third of that of the Song Dynasty, when agriculture was at its peak in Chinese history.
Indiscriminate cutting of trees, leveling of rivers and filling of lakes have resulted in drastic ecological deterioration in China. Today, China’s ecosystem is on the brink of collapse. The drying-up of the Hai River and the Yellow River and the pollution of the Huai River and the Yangtze River sever the life line on which the Chinese nation has depended for its survival. With the disappearance of grasslands in Gansu, Qinghai, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang, sandstorms have made their way into the central plains.
In the 1950s, under the guidance of the Soviet experts, the CCP built the Sanmenxia hydraulic power station on the Yellow River. To this day, this power station only gives a generating capacity at the level of a medium-sized river, despite the fact that the Yellow River is the second largest river in China. To make matters worse, this project has caused an accumulation of mud and sand at the river’s upper reaches and raised the height of the riverbed. Because of this, even a moderate flood brings enormous losses in life and property to people on both sides of the riverbank. In the 2003 flood of the Wei River, the peak water flux was 3700 cubic meters per second, a level that may occur every three to five years. Yet that flood caused a disaster unprecedented in the past 50 years.
There have been a multitude of large-scale reservoirs built in the locality of Zhumadian, Henan Province. In 1975, the dams of these reservoirs collapsed one after another. Within a short duration of two hours, 60,000 people were drowned. The total death toll reached as high as 200,000.
The CCP continues wanton acts of destruction on the land of China. The Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze River and the South-to-North Water Transfer Project are all attempts by the CCP to change the natural ecosystems with investments amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. This is not to mention those small and medium-sized projects to “fight with the earth.” Furthermore, it was once suggested within the CCP that an atomic bomb be used to blast open a passage on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to change the natural environment in western China. Although the CCP’s arrogance and contempt for the land have shocked the world, they are not unexpected.
In the hexagrams (Ba Gua) of The Book of Changes, China’s ancestors regarded heaven as Qian or the creative, and revered it as the heavenly Tao. They considered the earth as Kun or the receptive, and respected receptive virtues.
Kun, the hexagram following Qian, is explained in The Book of Changes as such: “Being in the hexagram of Kun, Earth’s nature is to extend and respond. In correspondence with this, superior persons handle and sustain all things with bountiful virtues.”
The Confucian commentary on The Book of Changes [16] says, “Perfect is Kun’s greatness; it brings birth to all beings.”
Confucius further commented on the nature of Kun, “Kun is the most soft, yet in motion it is firm. It is most still, yet in nature, square. Through following she obtains her lord, yet still maintains her nature and thus endures. She contains all things, and is brilliant in transforming. This is the way of Kun—how docile it is, bearing heaven and moving with time.”
Clearly, only in the earth mother’s receptive virtues of softness, stillness, and endurance in following heaven can all things sustain and flourish on earth. The Book of Changes teaches us the proper attitude toward the heavenly Tao and earthly virtues: to follow heaven, abide by the earth, and respect nature.
The CCP, however, in violation of Qian and Kun, promotes “battling with heaven and fighting with the earth.” It has plundered the earth’s resources at will. In the end, it will inevitably be punished by heaven, the earth and the law of nature.
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