The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) abusive past still holds lessons for Taiwanese, one of the last living victims of China’s Anti-Rightist Movement said yesterday at an event celebrating the movement’s 60th anniversary, calling for Taiwan to avoid direct dealings with Beijing.
“The Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] used to say the [Chinese] Communists were bandits, but that is too shallow — they are not bandits, they are Satan himself, so you should not make contact with them because they will only harm you: You cannot eat the devil, but the devil can eat you,” said Feng Guojiang (馮國將), an overseas Chinese in Indonesia, after he was targeted by the movement while studying architecture at Qinghua University and was sent to a Chinese labor reform camp for 20 years.
Feng was one of many people who took up Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) invitation to criticize the government and suggest reforms as part of the Hundred Flowers Campaign.
Feng was one of many leftist overseas Chinese who initially flocked to China after the CCP victory in the Chinese Civil War.
He was eventually acquitted of “rightism” and released from hard labor following the Cultural Revolution. Feng later moved to Hong Kong and then the US. Now 89 years old, he was in Taiwan yesterday on a brief stop over before what he said would likely be his last visit to his native Indonesia.
“I want to use this opportunity to share my views and I hope Taiwanese will take my experience into consideration,” he said at a forum in Taipei yesterday, expressing support for former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) 1979 policy of “no contact, no compromise and no negotiation” with the CCP.
He drew parallels between the CCP’s “united front” strategy toward Indonesian overseas Chinese during his student days and present-day Chinese rhetoric toward Taiwan.
“They use a lot of pretty, easily acceptable language which invokes our common language and race, but all of that is just rhetoric,” he said, calling on Taiwan to bolster its guard. “You have to see clearly that the core of the CCP has not changed, and you cannot let yourself become desensitized and buy into delusions: The CCP is still an evil party which does not harbor any goodwill toward Taiwan. All their sweet talk about how ‘both sides of the Taiwan Strait are one family’ is just a falsehood meant to win you over.”
While the CCP “corrected” many “rightist” sentences, it has never denounced the movement or offered victims compensation, he said.
New School for Democracy board chairman Tseng Chien-yuan (曾建元) said Feng’s disillusionment with the CCP following the Anti-Rightist Movement mirrored that of many Taiwanese dissidents, many of whom joined the CCP following the 228 Incident.
“Feng is very similar to many Taiwanese in his change of attitude toward the CCP, but he just happened to be on the front lines of an event that reminded many Taiwanese that we could not hold on to any hope concerning the CCP — we had to save our nation ourselves,” he said.
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