It’s spread further by banners with bright letters hung ingeniously on telephone wires. Its determination can be seen in brazen declarations written on the walls of the dictatorship's buildings. It's even written on banknotes.
There is a movement sweeping China, and it is dissolving the country’s ruling communist regime from its very roots. One after another, Chinese people have begun to “Tui Dang,” or “Quit the Party.”
That party is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the regime that has ruled China for nearly 60 years. Quitting the CCP is more like leaving the mafia than breaking ties with a political affiliation. It’s a move that can ruin a person’s career or land them in jail.
The Quit the Party movement started with a series of commentaries published in this newspaper four years ago. To date, it has resulted in some 46 million Chinese people publicly declaring that sworn pledges to serve the Party with their very lives are now null and void.
The Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party is the most detailed account of the CCP's rule in China ever published. It describes — in sometimes shocking detail — how the CCP has used violence, murder, deception, and misplaced nationalism to control the hearts and minds of the Chinese people.
Spreading the ‘Nine Commentaries’
An extensive study of the CCP’s massive Internet blockade by several top universities including Harvard Law School revealed that the Nine Commentaries is one of the top two most restricted topics singled out for Internet suppression.
This past October, a University of Toronto-based research lab uncovered a million-plus messages that the Chinese version of Skype recorded, presumably at the behest of the CCP. A substantial portion of these were about the Nine Commentaries and people withdrawing from the CCP.
Merely owning a copy of the Nine Commentaries is punishable by four years in prison.
Despite all that, the Nine Commentaries is spreading in China. So too is its impact.
Copies of the commentaries, assembled together in book form, enter China through any number of means, from copies sent over instant messaging systems to links provided through circumvention software to help would-be readers get around the CCP's “Great Firewall.”
Some brave people import it by the container full, or sneak copies into suitcases after a trip overseas. Some get mailed in on CDs that could be disguised as anything, from pirated movies to financial advice.
The result is enough to keep high-ranking cadres awake at night.
Last Tuesday over 40,000 Chinese people withdrew from the Party.
Many of the withdrawals are documented by submitting a declaration to the Quit the Party Web site, a process that relies on special technology to bypasses the Great Firewall. It is the same technology that U.S. government-funded Voice of America and Radio Free Asia use to send millions of e-mails to China per day.
Volunteers at overseas Quit the Party Centers who receive those withdrawals try to verify and register each one within 24 hours. Other withdrawals are done through instant messaging, Skype, a toll-free 800 number, and e-mail. When no other avenue is available people will write their declaration in a public space, such as on telephone poles, money, and even government buildings.
The Power of Historical Accuracy
The power of the Nine Commentaries is its fearless account of the CCP’s bloody history. Since its rise to power 60 years ago, China’s ruling communist regime has carried out wave after wave of political campaigns, always against a specific segment of China’s vast population.
Early campaigns were against landowners and businesspeople, religious figures, and minority groups. Then came attacks against intellectuals and “counter-revolutionaries.” All told, over six decades, the CCP has caused some 65 to 80 million unnatural deaths—most from direct persecution, others from man-made famines.
Nearly every Chinese family has someone who has been persecuted.
Each of the Nine Commentaries documents one aspect of the party, ranging from a general analysis of the CCP’s nature, to its rise to power, to its efforts to wipe out traditional Chinese culture.
Each commentary documents, in detail, how the Party conducted itself and the exact nature of the methods it used to crush dissent and maintain its power.
Shattering the Propaganda Delusion
The result of that painstaking documentation is startling. Mainland Chinese live under what some commentators have described as a mass state of the Stockholm Syndrome—a condition where captives, after facing violent threats and abuse, come to adore and serve their tormentors.
“It is like this today in China,” says David Gao, who heads the Quit the Party Center in New York City. But the delusion is broken by the Nine Commentaries, he says.
"It also awakens Chinese people’s morality and their intuitive knowledge born of 5,000 years of traditional Chinese culture, a culture devoid of the twisted mindset the CCP has tried to force into them.”
That mindset advocates violence and rejects basic moral principles, he explained.
“The commentaries also let Chinese people remove their deep terror of the CCP,” he said.
“After Chinese people read the Nine Commentaries, they never believe the CCP again and that means that the CCP loses the foundation of their influence.”
China’s communist regime has gone to great lengths to preserve that influence, even employing tens of thousands of Internet police as part of the Great Firewall. Western companies like Nortel and Cisco provided the regime with technology necessary to monitor Chinese surfers and censor the Internet. Companies like Yahoo and Google agreed to help by fixing searches on topics like “Tiananmen Square massacre” and “Falun Gong.”
The Terror of a Tyranny
Because of the power of the Nine Commentaries in breaking the spell of the CCP’s information control, the regime has made every effort to stop the spread of the series.
Besides doing everything possible to stifle attempts to spread the Nine Commentaries on the Internet, the regime has arrested people as old as 70 for distributing the book. Visitors to China have also been expelled for having a copy. One pilot for China Eastern Airlines sought asylum in Los Angeles after landing his plane because he barely escaped being arrested for talking about the book with a technician before take-off in China.
The regime has reason to be paranoid
China has seen a rash of riots in recent years and there have been numerous cases of outraged Chinese citizens attacking government offices and police. It is under this climate that the Nine Commentaries are spread and people are withdrawing from the CCP.
The largest riot in recent years broke out in Longnan City in Northwest China’s Gansu Province. The demonstration was due to a government-backed eviction project and unsatisfactory compensation to displaced residents. Tens of thousands of residents attempted to attack the Communist Party headquarters and set government vehicles on fire. The riot was violently suppressed by armed police who injured several hundred farmers in the process and may have killed some two dozen, according to witnesses.
China has also seen protests by taxi drivers, especially in Chongqing City over apparent collusion between the regime and fleet owners that makes taxi drivers bear the brunt of the fallout from low fares and rising costs.
This past June, 30,000 people rioted outside CCP government offices in Guizhou Province, setting fire to government vehicles after a local girl was raped and murdered, a tragedy widely rumored to have been covered up by the police and CCP officials.
Perhaps more disturbing was the protest outside a Shanghai court this October where some 1,000 gathered in support of Yang Jia, who was being tried for murdering six police officers. Supporters of Yang said that he was previously beaten by police and that a government cover-up of facts had muddied the case. Many were shouting anti-government slogans and about 40 were arrested.
Yang's MySpace.com account received a message that read, "You have done what most people want to do, but do not have enough courage to do."
Among those 1,000 protesters, video obtained by New Tang Dynasty Television captures some shouting “Down with the CCP,” a call that was unthinkable just 10 years ago.
Xinhua, China’s state-run media, announced that Yang Jia was executed on Nov. 26.
The Withdrawals
The CCP has numerous organizations, from the youth-orientated Young Pioneers which many Chinese join in grade school, to the core membership in the CCP which includes officials at all levels of government who actually control the country.
Chinese citizens who made the pledge to serve the CCP with their lives are now renouncing that pledge en masse.
More people in Beijing withdraw from the party than any other area, said Gao. Other large centers like Guandong, Shanghai come second, likely because it is easier for people there to get information from overseas.
Gao said that a couple of years ago, a volunteer for the Quit the Party Center who is an officer in a provincial government in Southern China, asked some 100 CCP officials, including the provincial governor, director generals of some departments as well as section chiefs, if any of them still believed in the communist party.
They all answered, “No.”
“Forty years ago, if someone said he did not believe in the CCP, he risked a lifetime in jail, if not death,” said Gao.
“Nowadays, if a person says he believes in the CCP, people think he is a joke, or lying. Or a madman.”
In the four years since the Nine Commentaries was published, an average of 30,000 Chinese people quit the party daily.
