China’s communist regime drafted a “patriotic education law” during a meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, Beijing’s rubber-stamp legislature, to maintain “national unity.”
A spokesperson for the Legislative Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress said on June 25 that a draft of a patriotic education law would be reviewed in the following days.
The spokesperson said the move aimed to promote and ensure “patriotism education in the new era” through the rule of law.
Experts have said that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has always deliberately confused the concepts of Party and country. The making of this patriotic education law, they say, is another attempt to force Chinese citizens to love the Party and its regime.
Li Yuanhua, an Australia-based scholar and former professor at Capital Normal University in Beijing, said on June 26 that the CCP has bundled love for the country, the Party, and socialism together.
“This legislation is to protect the Party from downfall, its totalitarian rule, and socialism," Li told The Epoch Times.
Mainland Chinese lawyer Yang Ning (pseudonym) said the CCP has been preaching patriotism for decades via compulsory state education that lasts nine years.
“Now that the CCP feels that deception with a pen can no longer achieve its goal, it uses the form of law to force people to bow their heads or remain silent. This is its most direct purpose,” Yang said.
The drafting of the law follows three years of the regime’s draconian “zero-COVID” policy amid an economic downturn and high unemployment.
The law is being seen as part of a doubling down on ideological control in China, which includes formulating more laws and regulations on information and freedom of expression.
Yuan Hongbing, an Australia-based legal scholar, told The Epoch Times on June 26 that the CCP’s behavior has caused outrage and resentment among some of China’s population.
The CCP wants to use the coercive force of the law to ensure people’s “loyalty” to it—"forcing people to love tyranny, that’s what they are doing now,” he said.
Yuan said this happens only when a totalitarian dictatorship develops to the extreme.
“There is no political party in the world that can force people to love it by the means of law. The CCP has deprived people of the right to freedom of thought and freedom of belief,” he said.
CCP Is Not China
Li said that the international community has distinguished the CCP from the Chinese people and China, which is what the Party fears most.“The Party must bind the CCP and China, the Chinese people, and the so-called socialism together as a bargaining chip against the world,” he said.
Li said he believes that drafting the patriotic education law is a manifestation of the regime’s response to its crisis of governance.
“It first confuses a concept: Patriotism is not loving the nation but loving the CCP’s tyranny,” he said.
“It has a sense of crisis, so in the form of legislation, it finds more ways to push for brainwashing the people.”
Li said this seems to be the Party’s legal preparation to annex Taiwan.
“In the future, if the CCP invades Taiwan by force, if people refuse to be drafted, it will say that you are not patriotic and violating the law,” he said.
Li said he is also concerned that the patriotic education legislation will cultivate more “little pinks” or “big pinks” (pro-CCP Chinese people). He said that after being incited by the CCP’s patriotism, these people will become tools for the Party to fight against the free world.
Yuan said that the Party now wants to use state coercive power to suppress any resistance, whether in thought or action. But this also means that the CCP has entered the breaking point of a more dangerous crisis.
“Nearly a decade of CCP tyranny has bankrupted its entire brainwashing technique, and the CCP is facing an unprecedented political crisis and a crisis of social trust," Yuan said.
“Now, it tries to force people to love its tyranny; it will only make the Chinese people resist it more strongly.”
