TORONTO—On May 5, 1818, a man was born in Germany whose ideas decades after his death led to the mass destruction of lives and societies.
Exactly 200 years after this date, a statue of Karl Marx given by the Chinese communist regime—itself responsible for the death of nearly 80 million people—was erected in Trier, the city of Marx’s birth, amidst great controversy and protests by victims of his communist ideology.
By pure coincidence, on the other side of the Atlantic, a group of people, among them politicians and scholars, gathered on the same day at the University of Toronto to mark the publication of a book by The Epoch Times titled “The Ultimate Goal of Communism.”
Published 14 years after The Epoch Times put out its first groundbreaking editorial series “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party,” the new book looks at the origins of communism, its nature, and its fate.
In a panel discussion following the book launch, Peter Kent, a member of the Canadian Parliament and a former cabinet minister, read from the opening paragraph of the “Nine Commentaries” to set the tone for the discussion.
“More than a decade after the fall of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist regimes, the international communist movement has been spurned worldwide. The demise of the Chinese Communist Party is only a matter of time,” Kent read.
“That’s important [and] why we’re all here today,” he told the audience, “[to] discuss when that demise might occur, how that demise might occur, what happens in the meantime, what Canada should do, or what Canada might have to do in terms of its foreign policy.”
‘Final Death Throes of Chinese communism’
Shortly after The Epoch Times published the “Nine Commentaries” in 2004, it started to receive statements from people announcing their withdrawals from the Chinese Communist Party and its affiliate organizations, the Communist Young Pioneers and the Communist Youth League.Today, Tuidang, which translates to “withdrawing from the Party” in Chinese, has grown into a massive grassroots movement, with over 300 million people having announced their withdrawals. That number grows by the tens of thousands every day.
“Bravo, congratulations, and thank you to the Tuidang Centre, as well to my friends at The Epoch Times,” said Consiglio Di Nino, a retired Canadian senator who served in the Senate from 1990 to 2012.
“I think that [Tuidang] really is the answer.”
Dr. Michael Bonner, a history scholar, said for many Chinese, the “Nine Commentaries” was their first exposure to the crimes of communism.
“The Tuidang phenomenon accelerated that, and today 300 million people have renounced the Communist Party,” he said.
‘Giant Enemy’
The panel also heard from Dr. Frank Xie, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina’s School of Business Administration.Xie explained how the Chinese regime uses unfair trade tactics to maintain huge trade surpluses when dealing with countries like the United States and Canada, so that China can keep accumulating vast foreign currency reserves. The accumulation of these reserves is what gives the Party the strength to repress and persecute its own people.
“The Chinese people don’t believe in communism anymore, ... and basically what the regime is doing, is just a bunch of immoral people wanting to keep on holding on to their own power.”
Sheng Xue, a Chinese-Canadian journalist and activist, described the plight of the Chinese people living in fear of the regime, even after moving abroad.
“We are living in Canada, but we cannot fully enjoy [life] because we have a giant enemy behind,” she said.
“If they are not liberated from fear, they [cannot live like] human beings.”
That’s why, she said, “the whole world has the responsibility” to ensure Chinese people are free from this fear.
“The Chinese people cannot do this by themselves.”
