SAN DIEGO - On October 1, 1949, the Red Army seized control of the mainland as China’s legitimate Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan. It was inaugural day for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and declared National Day for the illicit new People’s Republic of China.
Flowers, fountains and celebrations commemorated the occasion this year at Tiananmen Square, but it was a much more solemn scene in San Diego. At 99 Ranch Market, U.S. citizens of Chinese descent declared October 1 a day of infamy for the Chinese people, and for the human race. Their reason: The CCP is responsible for 56 years of suffering, 80 million unnatural deaths, and the darkest chapter in China’s history.
“This day started a hard life for the Chinese people,” said Jian Zhang, a senior software engineer who lives in Carlsbad. “Our purpose today is to let more people know about the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party and help them understand the last 56 years of our history, the life we really had in China, and how the CCP has brainwashed and cheated our people.”
Since publication of Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party in late 2004, nearly 5 million Chinese people have quit the CCP.
Zhang, born in China during the 1950s, personally witnessed most of the CCP’s history, including campaigns of persecution administered under the pretext of reform. “In each campaign, a different group of people was targeted,” he said.
Since seizing power, the CCP initiated land reform to eliminate the landlord class, and industrial reform the capitalist class. The Anti-Rightist movement was launched to flush out intellectuals whose thinking was in discord with the Party. In a campaign to industrialize China aggrandized as the “Great Leap Forward,” the CCP diverted agricultural resources into steel production. What followed was the worst famine in China’s history, one that drove people to cannabalism and produced 40 million deaths.
During the Cultural Revolution, the CCP banished to the countryside, imprisoned and killed millions it arbitrarily labeled as class enemies, turning father against son and husband against wife in the process. Thousands of unarmed students advocating freedom and accountability in government were murdered in 1989 at Tiananmen Square. Since 1999, people from all walks of Chinese society have been persecuted for practicing Falun Gong. For 56 years, the CCP has executed persecutory campaigns against the people of China to drive a stake into the human heart, and brainwash their minds with communism.
“Ever since we were born, all we read about is how the CCP is the great savior,” said Dr. Jie Yang, a scientist at the University of California, San Diego. “We were taught to hate our enemies who didn’t obey the CCP, and that anti-CCP means anti-China. This propaganda was reinforced since kindergarten until it became as natural as eating and sleeping.”
“As human beings, we lost our independent thinking,” reiterated Zhang. “Some people haven’t had the chance to read the Nine Commentaries, so they still believe what the Party says.”
Unable to sustain open scrutiny, the CCP constantly maneuvers to silence criticism and nonconformity. Thousands of intellectuals and political dissidents are in prison for holding opinions incongruous with CCP ideology. Crackdowns against Christians, Catholics, Buddhists and Taoists evidence the CCP’s disdain for upright, traditional beliefs. Because the CCP fundamentally opposes truthfulness, compassion and tolerance, it persecutes practitioners of Falun Gong. After 56 years in power, more than half of the Chinese people have suffered persecution.
With a track record like that, what the CCP fears most is the free flow of information. According to Erping Zhang, Executive Director of the Association for Asian Studies, the CCP has spent at least $800 million and employs approximately 50,000 cyber police whose sole purpose is to monitor and control the Internet traffic of an estimated 100 million Chinese.
“There is no private media enterprise in China and no free speech. They can open up your mail and tap your phone,” said Jian Zhang. “They have no thought for human rights. They only want to control people.” To this day, the CCP denies the people of China their most fundamental human rights, including freedom of assembly, speech and belief.
On this National Day, volunteers from the San Diego chapter of the Quit the Party Service Center, a nonprofit organization established to assist Chinese people around the world in withdrawing from the CCP, petitioned at the entrances of 99 Ranch Market. There they shared the true story of the CCP in hopes that it would find its way back to China, and help those in their homeland free themselves from the CCP.
“I hope that every Chinese person has a chance to read the Nine Commentaries, said Chunlin Li, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego. “In the long run, the Chinese people will live in a country free of communism.”
The volunteers say the CCP is rotten to the core and incapable of fundamental reform. According to Jian Zhang, any appearance of reform is simply window-dressing to attract foreign investment and convince people that China has modernized. In reality, the gap between rich and poor is bigger in China than in other countries. The countryside remains poor and backward, the nation is an environmental disaster, and with the CCP violating China’s constitution and manipulating its judicial system, the rule of law is lawlessness.
“Foreign businesses come to China because they want to use China’s cheap labor and avoid penalties for damaging the environment. Nobody cares how this effects the people in China because the people in China have no rights,” said Zhang. “The government is controlled by a small group of people who are not elected by the people. Their interest is not for the people, but for the Party and themselves.”
