Some members of the political elite in the United States and other Western countries seem to admire the methods used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in pursuing their own versions of manipulating and suppressing domestic dissent.
The United States appears to be jettisoning some of the constitutional protections guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution in an accelerating emulation of CCP-style methods by weaponizing the federal government against political dissent.
The Big Egg Roll
The First Amendment in the U.S. Bill of Rights is No.1 for a reason: America’s Founding Fathers knew from their direct experiences that free political speech is the best check on a tyrannical central government. The Second Amendment is No. 2 because the right to bear arms enforces the free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.The CCP fears the Chinese people because the Party illegitimately rules China.
The CCP tightly controls the Chinese population, society, economy, and military through an extensive domestic security apparatus, including internal police and informants, a state-run media that conveys what is acceptable and not in terms of public narratives, a corrupt communist bureaucracy that attempts to control most aspects of daily life, an ever-expanding hi-tech social controls system that surveils and monitors the behavior of Chinese citizens, and other measures intended to perpetuate the rule of the CCP by identifying, punishing, and squelching any dissent to CCP orthodoxy and policies.
Article 3 of the Chinese Constitution mandates that all state institutions operate under the communist principle of “democratic centralism.” That principle mixes oil and water: free and open discussion (democracy) and party unity and discipline (central control). The CCP’s iron fist determines what is permitted in China; “democracy with Chinese characteristics” amounts to a police state.
While the constitution itself “guarantees” the rights of Chinese citizens (Article 35: “freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration” and Article 36: “freedom of religious belief”), what Chinese citizen would risk the provisions of Article 37, which states that “No citizen shall be arrested unless with the approval or by the decision of a people’s procuratorate or by the decision of a people’s court, and arrests must be made by a public security organ”? People’s courts are the kangaroo courts run by the CCP. And then there are the “public security organs.”
The internal Chinese police apparatus of the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) monitors and punishes any dissenters from CCP narratives of the policies that are endlessly propagandized by CCP bureaucrats and state-run Chinese media.
The mission of the “No. 1 department” and its subordinate PSBs is “to collect and analyze intelligence, detect and act against individuals and cases that endanger social and political stability as well as national security, target religious and ethnic groups, strengthen security in academic institutions and state-affiliated entities, and recruit informants.”
To execute this mission, this gargantuan police apparatus includes tens of thousands of informants and is similar to the domestic police and spying operations in other totalitarian regimes, for example, the Gestapo in Nazi Germany and the NKVD/KGB in Soviet Russia. Once a person is targeted as a potential “enemy of the state,” persecution, lengthy terms of confinement, and forced rehabilitation are inevitable. The Tibetans, Uyghurs, Falun Gong adherents, and other minority groups have felt the brunt of these measures.
The authority for the MPS and MSS is derived from Article 28 of the Chinese Constitution: “The state shall maintain public order, suppress treason and other criminal activities that jeopardize national security, punish criminal activities, including those that endanger public security or harm the socialist economy, and punish and reform criminals.”
US Emulates the Chinese Domestic Surveillance State
Since the passage of the “Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism” (PATRIOT) Act in October 2001, provisions of that legislation have been used to expand the federal government’s domestic surveillance of American citizens. These expanding surveillance powers are directly at odds with Americans’ privacy rights and the First Amendment. Federal agencies have been weaponized to target and suppress political dissent.This ongoing federal manhunt continues three years after the fact while the perpetrators, organizers, and financial backers of the BLM riots in 2020 have largely either not been pursued or, if prosecuted, received light sentences despite the over $2 billion in property damage alone delivered by those violent rioters.
The DOJ has employed lawfare to target and eliminate political opponents through civil lawsuits, federal and state indictments under questionable or little-used statutes, ballot removal lawsuits, and attempts to disqualify state electors. This amounts to the kind of system used in China to ensure that only CCP-approved candidates can be “elected.”