In an orgy of backslapping and self-congratulatory hyperbole, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) yesterday threw a massive party for itself to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founding in 1921.
Choreographed celebrations took place across China over the past two days, but the main events were in Beijing, where yesterday Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) addressed an adoring crowd in Tiananmen Square. The festivities featured all the gaudy glitz, iconography and regimented blandness that is to be expected at CCP jamborees. It was the 2008 Beijing Olympics all over again, minus the athletes: a giant stage for the CCP to project a sanitized image of itself to its people and the rest of the world.
Needless to say, the usual suspects from Taiwan’s pro-China lobby latched on to the celebrations like needy children, and joined in on the CCP’s airbrushing of history.
Reporting by international media in the run-up to the centenary has largely taken the form of a scorecard, weighing up the party’s “hits and misses.” A general gist was that Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) flawed policies resulted in millions of deaths, but the party dusted itself off after the Cultural Revolution and unleashed an economic miracle that lifted tens of millions out of poverty, more than at any time in human history.
This form of analysis is hopelessly flawed and regurgitates the CCP’s propaganda.
Leaving aside the party’s brutal terrorist tactics employed prior to 1949, once it was in charge of China, Mao’s policies, from the Anti-Rightist Movement to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, are estimated to have starved or killed up to 60 million people — more than those who suffered under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
The party’s export of Maoist communism to other Asian nations gave birth to the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields of Cambodia. Historians estimate that at least 90 percent of foreign aid to Pol Pot’s regime came from the CCP.
In China, the situation deteriorated to such an extent during the Cultural Revolution that during the Guangxi Massacre, thousands reportedly participated in cannibalism — and not because of famine.
Under three decades of Mao’s inept and sadistic rule, the CCP set China’s development back by at least as many decades. By 1979, the party relented and began to grant its downtrodden citizens the freedom to trade on the open market. Had it not been for the CCP, China could have been as prosperous as Taiwan, Singapore or South Korea were at that point. China’s subsequent multi-decade period of explosive economic growth has been a game of manic catch-up, in spite of, not thanks to, the rule of the CCP.
Former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) is usually described as a benign liberal reformer, yet he initiated no democratic reforms, started a war with Vietnam and ordered the People’s Liberation Army to fire on its own people during the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. Contrary to popular belief, most of the killing occurred away from the square, in the streets and alleyways of Beijing, with the army firing indiscriminately at residents in their homes.
Deng’s appointed successor, former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民), launched the brutal suppression of millions of Falun Gong practitioners and presided over the introduction of forced organ harvesting of prisoners.
Then there is the ongoing repression in Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia; the list goes on.
Praising the CCP for its “achievements” is as crass as attempting to provide a “balanced” analysis of the Nazi Party: "Yes they did destroy Germany’s democracy, and they were horrible to the Jews, but they built some fine roads."
Let us hear no more of the CCP’s “achievements”; it is an inglorious centenary of shame.
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