WASHINGTON, DC—Regime collapse in China may not be on the tips of the lips of the many Western observers, but the Chinese dissident community has something else to say.
Gathered on Sept. 27 in the U.S. Capitol to mark the anniversary of the 61st year of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) successful insurgency and seizure of political power, the themes were multiple: a discussion of all things evil the CCP has done; the announcement of the publishing of the book “Lessons in Democracy” in Chinese; a discussion of why the CCP’s monopoly on power is now in jeopardy, or as Wei Jingsheng put it: why “the CCP is like an arrow at the end of its flight”; and a discussion of why the mass of renunciations of the CCP by Chinese people (called “tuidang”) has become more than a headache for the regime.
Organized by the Wei Jingsheng Foundation and the Asia Democracy Alliance, the event featured half a dozen speakers, including: Kama Namgyal, chair of Dokham Chushigandruk, a Tibetan human rights group; Ge Defang, U.S. Director of the League of Chinese Victims; Ni Yuxian, chair of the Chinese Freedom and Democracy Party; and executive director of the Global Service Center for Quitting CCP Dr. Li Dayong, who spoke about the implications of the renunciation campaign he helps coordinate.
Wei Jingsheng began the forum by dismissing Deng Xiaoping’s much vaunted nostrum of “reform and opening up,” which has not actually made the masses of Chinese much richer. “We know that China has two hundred to three hundred million in abject poverty,” he said.
He argued that China’s apparent wealth is concentrated among a small elite, and was obtained through exploiting both the West and the Chinese masses. “Everyone knows that workers’ wages are extremely low in China—and they use cheap products sent to the West to cause trouble with the markets here.”
In sum, Wei said, when the CCP was under Mao, it was a disaster for the Chinese people, but in the thirty years under and since Deng, “they not only bring disaster to the Chinese people, but to the whole world.”
“So here we’re looking at the 61 years of the CCP’s rule from every aspect.”
One such aspect was Mao’s “Little Red Book,” and how everyone used to carry one around; Roland Watson, author of the newly translated “Lessons in Democracy,” suggested this idea be subverted by a sort of “little blue book of democracy.”
“It would be much better in China if everyone had a little book about democracy that they read, that they could study,” Watson said with a wry smile. “It doesn’t have to be mine, it can be any other book about democracy,” sitting at home or in the car.
‘Tuidang’
The last speaker, Li Dayong, thought he had something close to such a book. Called the “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party” and published by The Epoch Times, it is a volume that has spread similar to how “samizdat” used to spread in the Soviet Union, in unconventional ways that confound the CCP’s strict censorship regime.
The book is a global indictment of communism, and especially the Chinese kind. The campaign to renounce the CCP began in December 2004, soon after the publication of the editorial series. “Nine Commentaries” provides an unvarnished examination of the nature and history of the CCP.
The result of the publication was an open call to the Chinese public and those concerned with China’s future to “renounce” the CCP, a peaceful campaign that has been led by Falun Gong practitioners, one of the most severely persecuted groups in modern China.
The grassroots movement that resulted soon formed the Global Service Center, which collects (and encourages) renunciations via phone, fax, or Internet. The total number of renunciations are tallied online, and now number over 81 million.
Renunciations are counted for any individual who has ever been a member of the Young Pioneers of China, the Communist Youth League of China, or the Chinese Communist Party proper; the former two mass organizations are used by the CCP to indoctrinate China’s young people, and cover the ages 6-14 and 14-28 respectively.
Though formal membership may have expired, renunciations are still collected from former members of these organizations—which includes a large proportion of China’s population.
On the surface the CCP appears not to have responded to the tuidang movement, Li Dayong says, but the response inside Party has been a frenzy of activity: those who distribute the book in China are punished severely, and political cleansing movements the likes of which had not been seen since the 1950s—complete with forced confessions, focused lessons in groupthink, renewal of the oath to join the CCP, and re-education meant to maintain the “advanced nature” of the Party cadres at all levels—sprang up.
“Tuidang” statements are related partly to disaffection with the cross-strata strife of Chinese society—such as entrenched corruption, environmental damage, the decay of behavioral standards, the absence of basic social trust, the capricious violence of the Party elite, their expropriations of land and property, the deprival of basic human rights, etc.—but overall, according to Li, are about the Chinese people’s repugnance at the CCP’s immorality.
“I wish to point out that instead of being a political movement aimed at bringing down the CCP, the essence of renouncing the CCP lies in the spiritual revolution in each individual,” Li stated.
Nevertheless, the impact of the tuidang campaign may bring that about anyway. Li concluded with a Chinese saying: “Not only can water float a boat, but also sink it”—meaning that while the CCP has thus far ridden successfully on the backs of the masses, the renunciation campaign may mean things turn out differently.
Dissidents are hopeful. “I hope that the great mass of Chinese who have suffered injustice will take tuidang further; I hope it catches on like a prairie fire,” said Ge Defang, director of the League of Chinese Victims.
