Tue, Oct 01, 2019 page8

• Seventy years under the red flag

  • By Nigel Li 李澤霖
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  On Oct. 1, 1949, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chairman Mao Zedong (毛澤東) proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) before a jubilant crowd at Tiananmen Square. Mao declared that the victory of the People’s Liberation Army against the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) meant that the CCP could now “relieve the people of their suffering, and to struggle for their rights.”

  Soon after, the Five-starred Red Flag was raised to the tune of March of the Volunteers and Chinese would continue to live under its shadow.

  The CCP’s victory and Chinese turning to communism was less because they desired the utopian ideology of communism, and more because they were desperate to get out from under the incompetent KMT government of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石).

  At the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the CCP was cautiously open to forming a coalition government with the KMT. US General George Marshall worked tirelessly to bring the parties to an agreement, but ultimately failed in preventing the war that would drive the KMT to Taiwan.

  Chiang believed that the CCP could be easily defeated, as he was recapturing CCP-held cities with few casualties — but this was precisely the CCP’s strategy. With KMT forces stretched thin and generals overconfident of victory, the CCP retook cities one by one, surrounding them and starving them. The violent siege of Changchun led to the deaths of 200,000 civilians and the crushing defeat of Chiang’s 60th and New Seventh Army — his best-trained men.

  Chiang’s defeat reflected his stubbornness to reform and democratize. He was more interested in destroying the CCP than in rebuilding China into a democratic nation. This was all to Marshall’s disappointment — China was red; the East was red.

  Seventy years have passed since the day Mao declared a new dawn. Chinese believed that the CCP would liberate the masses and bring about the progress and abundance that China desperately needed. The tragedy that befell China after the CCP’s takeover is a testament to what the party and its violent ideology can produce.

  While China has progressed beyond the ideological zeal that pulled it backward, it finds itself in a new era of ideological restraints. The country is under the leadership of a state-capitalist machine that desires economic growth with political maturation.

  China’s Great Leap Forward in 1958 focused a religious-like zeal on increasing agricultural and industrial production — no matter the human cost. That mentality persists in China’s leadership — the trade dispute with the US has pinched China where it hurts, economic numbers have slipped and China is pressured not to drum up nationalist rhetoric.

  To avoid exposing the true nature of CCP rule, the leadership has pushed the blame onto foreign actors seeking the weakening and destruction of the Chinese state. News releases often recall the “century of humiliation” and the need to never let it happen again — such rhetoric leads to nationalist tendencies and the consolidation of minds under the party.

  While the red flag has been raised in Hong Kong, Hong Kongers have refused to be repressed by the central government and have found the power within themselves to reject authoritarianism. Celebrations of China’s National Day have been toned down due to the chaos engulfing the territory — to the protesters benefit.

  However, the protests show that the CCP has become the reactionary force that Mao declared to have wiped out 70 years ago. Was it not the refusal of the KMT to reform and democratize that pushed Chinese to support Mao? After 70 years of supposed “liberation,” have the Chinese truly been freed of the chains that enslaved them?

  While economic progress has graced the lives of millions of Chinese, they remain trapped in an authoritarian cage. Like a caged bird — that desires to be free and can see the world beyond, but cannot fly to it — the Chinese are to be subjected to greater control under the CCP.

  Mass behavioral conditioning through social-credit scores and other applications of technology to enhance the CCP’s grip are only going to turn China into the nightmare that George Orwell warned about.

  In Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party that ruled the fictitious Oceania state of Ingsoc — short for English Socialism — monitored citizens’ actions and thoughts. Love for the Party and Big Brother was unconditional. Orwell wrote that the Party’s ideology had evolved to the point where it “rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it does so in the name of Socialism.”

  The KMT believed in uniting China, building democracy and improving the welfare of people, but its defeat was precisely because it worked against those ideals. The future of the CCP rests on that single fulcrum, too. The CCP has its idea, but has worked against the values of liberation and the protection of people’s rights — all in the name of communism.

  Nigel Li is a student at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.
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