Let's Put the Red Back in China
By Joyce Mucci
Jmmucci@aol.com
December '98 Featured Rightgrrl
Member, Rightgrrl Advisory Board
April 19, 1999
"When opponents present openings, you should penetrate them immediately. Get to what they want first, subtly anticipate them. Maintain discipline and adapt to the enemy in order to determine the outcome of the war. Thus, at first you are like a maiden, so the enemy opens his door then you are like a rabbit on the loose, so the enemy cannot keep you out." Master Sun from the Art of War
Comrades! The Communist Chinese are living large.
Bejing is on the cusp of the 21st century loaded down with a proverbial fruit basket of Western capitalist expansion while still maintaining their brown-shirt, jack-booted tactics against political dissidents, the clergy, women and the people of Tibet. Indeed, with a quality espionage program underway, and a hand in the American electoral process, things in Bejing are looking good. The added bonus of nonintervention into their internal affairs has them gushing former President Deng's words, "To get rich is glorious."
The glitz and tinsel orchestrated for the recent visit of Communist Party member Zhu Rongji, should solidify in our minds that our current administration seeks to present to us a China that is not all that Communist. In fact the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are just plain folks trying to work out their problems like everyone else.
Au contraire!
The truth of matter is the CCP is on a long-range plan to carry out the Marxist/Leninist party line with a twist. Call it Communism - the new and improved version.
The CCP could not afford to be bound, of course, to the antediluvian order of communism that was the Soviet Union. Indeed, they needed to disburden themselves of the image as Red Chinese in order to be players in an international market. The cash cows of the West would only tolerate doing business with market socialists. They did not, however, forsake their Marxist/Leninist, Mao Zedong roots. In his 1997 address to CCP members, the President of China reiterated their complete devotion to communist doctrine and encouraged the people to study the Masters.
Deng Xiaoping is the newest member of the Communist cartel of dead intellectuals. Deng's Theory is the heartbeat of the market socialism being shamelessly peddled in the U.S. by Premier Zemin and Zhu Rhonji.
Deng's contribution to China's facelift was to experiment with an economic expanse under the guise of helping the 1.2 billion people in China. James A. Dorn of the Cato Institute reminds us that "…attempts to plan the market are, in absence of a constitution that protects property and contracts, reflections of what F.A. Hayek aptly called the "fatal conceit" of socialism." We should be under no false belief regarding the disposition of the CCP. The appropriation of the Chinese version of economic freedom and trade is the vehicle that bankrolls the Marxist march toward the 21st century.
Not Really Communists?
The public relations machine of the CCP has been wildly successful. With an infatuated U.S. press and an administration that is soft on Communism they have conveniently glossed over the militancy of the CCP. Deng Xiaoping's speech after the Tiennamen Square massacre should clear up any myths about that. Deng noted, "We also face a rebellious clique and a large number of the dregs of society, who want to topple our country and overthrow our party." Further, he conveyed that the dissidents that lost their lives that day were working to " establish a totally Western-dependent bourgeois republic."
But that was in 1989, and look how far the CCP has come since then, at least according to the Clinton administration. However, the red in China cannot be airbrushed away. For example, in December 1998, President Jiang Zemin turned his wrath on two dissidents that brazenly tried to set up an opposition party. Zemin vowed, " to crush subversive activities and rule out Western-style democracy" and that the " western mode of political systems must never be copied."
Red Trade
Talk is cheap. Whether the talk is coming from U.S. free-trade aficionados or from the CCP. The free traders insist that by fueling a free market system in China we are able to promote political change within a Communist regime. This, in spite of a trade imbalance that heavily favors the Communist government.
American businesses have cashed in on market socialism and see their role as missionaries of freedom. Donald V. Fites, chairman and CEO of Caterpillar, Inc. said, "the whole range of American activity in other nations transmits our values and ideals. But it has been our experience that trade and investment are particularly powerful tools for helping those values take root." And of course it doesn't hurt profits.
However, the CCP has little to worry that American values are springing up like Easter lilies all over China. With Premier Zhu at the helm of their economic upswing the free-market entrepreneurial express won't be rolling into the station with any great force. The June 21, 1998 issue of the South China Morning Post, reviewed Premier Zhu's first 100 days in office. One charge made against the Econ Wizard was, "Instead of relaxing the state's grip on the purchase, storage or sale of grain by encouraging competition between the state and private companies, Premier Zhu has issued new regulations outlawing competition from the private sector." Moreover, as career politicos and American business interests neck in the backseat with the CCP serious violations of human rights are languishing by the wayside, waiting for some far-reaching political reality that may never materialize.
Every Human's Rights
The denial of the basics of human rights is the cornerstone of the CCP and a mainstay of ordinary life in China. Communism can only maintain its power through intimidation and coercion. Although, according to Premier Zhu, these accounts are "greatly exaggerated" and this is because the international community, and the American people in particular, are "… misled because there may be some people who don't have a very good understanding of China who paint a picture where the situation seems to be getting worse from day to day." Really?
Zhu, in case you were not paying attention, was on a mission to the U.S. to help us understand the Chinese way and of course, "to let them get whatever they have against China off their chest." As if venting to a Communist is going change anything.
The tally of human suffering in China has been well documented, and when confronted with the facts will cause a sane person to recoil in horror. Yet the CCP continue without impunity. Michael Weisskopf chronicled their coercive population control programs, as far back as 1987. Weisskopf writing in The Washington Post noted, "The size of the family is too important to be left to the personal decision of the couple," said the Minister of Family Planning who was in China at the time.
Depravity, in which the net result is human suffering, is at the center of the CCP birth program and was graphically explained by the testimony of Mrs. Gao, the former Administrator of the Planned Birth Control Office in the People's Republic of China. In her 1998 appearance before the subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights Mrs. Gao enumerated the atrocities inflicted on women, their babies and family. For instance, the Chinese government routinely imposes exorbitant fines on couples who had, "unauthorized" children, sometimes amounting to three or four times the average income of a Chinese citizen. Their homes are summarily destroyed and their personal property confiscated when they cannot pay.
The Communist government uses a network of paid informants such as relatives, neighbors and friends. Children are treated as contraband and then targeted for extermination. Sterilization is performed not only as a preventative measure but also as punishment. The family planning clinics in China house detention facilities for those who are in violation of the government's planned birth policy. Family members are held against their will if the women they are looking for cannot be found. Indeed, they will confiscate, burn or tear down her parent's home. IUD's are routinely implanted in women who either have broken the birth law or implanted in women who have the regulation number of children.
Abortions are routinely performed at any stage of pregnancy on women who are not authorized to be pregnant. House to house searches are conducted, and night raids are commonplace by planned birth supervision teams.
Further, the systemic nature of a Communists regime lies not just in the birth control clinics. For example, the Transportation Department is not allowed to issue drivers' license to those who violate the birth-control policy. The Department of Finance will not allow a loan to be given to anyone who violates the birth policy. The Agriculture Department will not approve any land to individuals who violate the birth policy. Without the availability of a driver license, passport, house, job, and bank loans the free-market system that is touted as the salvation of the Chinese people is irrelevant. U.S. investments will not stop the central government's control over the wombs of women. The CCP, regardless of the twisted spin the President and free-traders put on it, embodies all that is the antithesis of freedom that our nation stands for here and abroad. No amount of free trade will put a stop to this kind of human suffering.
Morality Plays
Moreover, in light of the overwhelming evidence of human right abuses occurring in China, Jonathan Clarke, of the Cato Institute notes, "…human rights come into play when there is little else at stake." Kosovo is now feeling the full weight of this administration's wrath. Yet, the human lives lost and tortured do not, under any circumstance, stack up to the conditions that the CCP is inflicting on its own. But because of economic opportunity or strategic concerns the Clinton administration wants a soft bed in which to lie. Clarke goes on to explain that we should, and the world, should appreciate our sense of moral conscience. And that we do not exercise our military power "…arbitrarily but according to an accepted set of universal standards." "The trouble with universal standards" according to Clarke is that they make "no distinction between friend and foe, big and small, important and peripheral. " The Clinton administration has played favorites and the high moral ground upon which it is perched is a sham.
We can club Milosevic over the head with accusations of genocide, ethnic cleansing and even rape because he really is a small time player with little to offer the United States. Kosovo does not factor into our GNP, there are no trade agreements, nor are U.S. businesses seeking to open the next Macdonald's in downtown Kosovo. If any of these situations were the case the President would not have played the human rights card. Instead he would have practiced 'engagement'.
In the same way he is willing to whip out the human rights when it is politically expedient Clinton is not above playing the race card. In a speech delivered on April 7, 1999 the President warned that we should not enter into a "…campaign-driven Cold War with China…a climate of mistrust that hurts Chinese -Americans." We are, of course, to keep in mind the larger issue - the self-interest of China not our national security.
Characterizing our concerns as a platform for hate is the ultimate liberal red herring. True to form, Clinton demonizes any legitimate debate, whether it is about lying under oath or about Communist China, so as to deflect scrutiny into his own closet of malfeasance. We should reject out of hand the President's warnings about inflaming a new Cold War, and intensify the debate regarding our economic and moral relationship with a Communist regime.
Let's work to put the Red back in China.
This article copyright © 1999 by Joyce Mucci and may not be reproduced in any form without the express written consent of its author. All rights reserved.