Experts have debated this week whether the Chinese people will be next to demand democracy. In fact, no expert predicted this year’s Egyptian uprising or 1989’s anti-communist revolutions that led to the fall of Berlin Wall and the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

When the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) comes, it will likely be a surprise. The real question is not whether the Chinese people will be next but whether the Chinese care about freedom and democracy.

For over 100 years, the Chinese people have demonstrated again and again their desire for freedom and democracy. This aspiration, though, has been denied by a difficult history, a history that must be known in order to understand the situation of the Chinese people today.

Two generations of Chinese have suffered a collective Stockholm syndrome.

From Republic to CCP

In 1911, the Chinese dethroned the last emperor and established the Republic of China. As the first freely elected president of China, Sun Yat-Sen promised a nation built on the principles of democracy, sovereignty, and welfare.

Such a program, however, was pushed aside by the fragmentation of political power as warlords resisted the republic and a little later by invasion as Japan moved into Manchuria.

The nationalist Kuomintang Party (KMT) achieved a rough kind of national unity and resisted the Japanese. But the KMT’s leader Chiang Kai-shek ruled as a dictator, and his party’s corruption deeply disappointed the Chinese people.

That disappointment opened the door for a Soviet-supported CCP. The CCP promised Chinese people something that seemed even better than democracy: a communist society in which everyone is equal, and everything is available to meet the needs of the people.

Of course, the CCP’s editorial mouthpieces played on the Chinese people’s desires for freedom and democracy and constantly packaged the CCP as the party that would deliver these long-cherished hopes.

Lives were sacrificed to realize this dream: Millions died in the civil war between the KMT and the CCP, with Chinese on both sides believing their party offered the best chance for freedom.

In 1949, the CCP drove the KMT to Taiwan. Mao Zedong, then-chairman of the CCP, stood on Tiananmen Square and declared, “The Chinese will forever stand up.” The Chinese people heard this affirmation of China’s dignity and were moved to tears, believing a good life was ahead of them.

 

Collective Stockholm Syndrome

In 1950, however, Mao told the Chinese people that their freedom and sovereignty were threatened by the U.S.-led Western, anti-communist forces in Korea. They had to defend themselves by going to war, Mao said. A million Chinese died for freedom while fighting the wrong enemy.

As soon as the Korean War subsided, many Chinese small-business owners, former landlords, and Chinese who were not happy with the CCP’s policies found themselves labeled anti-revolutionary and were tortured and killed. Those not singled out were terrified, but they were told the brutality was necessary to protect the fruits of the revolution.

China has never before seen a group successfully resist the CCP.

In 1957, Chinese intellectuals and some Chinese officials realized the CCP was just another totalitarian regime. They spoke out and criticized the CCP’s policies and leadership. Very soon, over half a million were labeled as rightists—enemies of the state. They were removed from their jobs, put in exile in the remote countryside, humiliated, tortured, and killed. Many committed suicide.

After that, the Chinese people were traumatized. They were forced into worshiping Mao Zedong as a Chinese “savior” and the CCP as a mother who gave China a second life. The fear of death, torture, and humiliation, the instinct for survival, and gratitude for any small kindnesses shown by the CCP have produced two generations who suffer a collective Stockholm syndrome.

This mental condition helped generate further tragedy in 1966, when Mao decided to use his god-like cult of personality to get rid of his political rivals. Everyone fought everyone else in order to prove loyalty to Mao.

The fanatical movement called the Great Cultural Revolution caused millions of deaths in the first two months as Mao proudly told Ho Chi Minh, the visiting chief of Vietnam’s Communist Party. Deng Xiaoping later told the Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci that the death toll was an astronomical number, and no one would ever figure it out.

The Chinese who suffered included people at all levels: Mao’s once-close colleagues and friends, farmers, workers, high school students, psychiatrists, university presidents, scientists, CCP chiefs and generals at every level, the son of the late Deng Xiaoping, and the father of the current Chinese Communist leader Hu Jintao.

During the Cultural Revolution, the words freedom and democracy were said to be opposed to the communist revolution; using them could cost one’s life.

Democracy Movements

Yet after Mao died in 1976, the Chinese immediately took action. In 1978, Wei Jingsheng and many other brave Chinese started the Xidan Wall, also known as the Democracy Wall—a wall on Xidan Street in Beijing on which articles were pasted and before which speeches were made advocating for freedom and democracy.

 

Deng Xiaoping used the Chinese people’s longing for freedom and democracy against his political rivals, including Mao’s hand-picked successor, Hua Goufeng, and the so-called Gang of Four. By 1980, Deng had gained power. He banned the Democracy Wall and jailed Wei Jingsheng and other activists.

Deng continued the CCP’s dictatorship and, with his economic reforms, introduced systemic corruption, as those in power were the ones who profited from the reforms.

Yet, once again, in 1989, the people of China rallied to the cause of freedom and democracy. University students from Beijing and many other major cities, later joined by teachers, journalists, government officials, workers, and Chinese from all walks of life, took to Tiananmen Square in Beijing and the streets of other major cities, shouting slogans for democracy and against corruption.

For several weeks, Chinese all over the country were alive again, enjoying the long-forgotten taste of freedom and their hopes for democracy.

Tanks and machine guns would kill the euphoria. The protestors’ main demand was punishment for corrupt officials and their family members, but Deng understood that satisfying that demand would inevitably lead to the root cause of the corruption—the CCP’s absolute power.

When Deng ordered the army into Tiananmen Square, thousands of China’s most idealistic young people were killed. In a speech given to CCP leaders after the massacre, Deng asserted that maintaining the CCP’s power for 20 more years was worth killing 200,000 people.

Everyone had to agree with Deng’s policy in order to survive politically, professionally, and economically. After decades of struggle, the combination of the tanks in Tiananmen and the promise that some Chinese might become prosperous seemed to put the Chinese people’s spirit to sleep. A learned helplessness and hopelessness quickly spread, and the Chinese people began to focus on areas that were politically safe.

Spiritual Awakening

A change would come to China, not in the form of people seeking political freedom or democracy but rather freedom of belief.

Ten years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, in April 1999, more than ten thousand Chinese people lined up outside the Office for Letters and Visits of China’s State Council, the office designated by the central authorities to receive complaints about local officials. The location is just a short walk from Zhongnanhai, the headquarters and living quarters for the top CCP officials.

 

The people lining the streets included scientists, university professors, computer engineers, musicians, military officials, workers, retirees, and farmers from Beijing and nearby cities. They complained that the local police were harassing them for their practice of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice that includes Qigong exercises and living according to the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

The practitioners demanded freedom of belief and assembly so that they could meet together to study, discuss, and practice the Falun Gong exercises. They peacefully dispersed after then-Premier Zhu Rongji orally agreed to their demands.

The newly crowned head of the CCP, Jiang Zemin, had a different idea. He speculated that some “political master mind” and “anti-China Western forces” had orchestrated the protest. He ordered the “eradication” of the practice and utilized every means possible to “transform” the 100 million Chinese who practiced Falun Gong.

Arbitrary detention, brainwashing techniques, mind-altering drugs, rape, and the harvesting of practitioners’ organs for transplantation were used. The Falun Dafa Information Center can confirm the deaths of over 3,000 practitioners but estimates the deaths due to torture and abuse number in the tens of thousands. In addition, tens of thousands of practitioners have likely been murdered through organ harvesting. Millions have been tortured.

Jiang thought the practice would be eliminated in three months. Eleven years later, with little support from the international community, the Chinese people who practice Falun Gong have never stopped seeking freedom of belief.

The practitioners in China work on a daily basis to tell the Chinese people and state and Party officials what Falun Gong is, that it is persecuted, and that the persecution is evil and a gross violation of practitioners’ human rights.

For the past six years, after the CCP refused to end the persecution of Falun Gong, practitioners have worked to convince the Chinese people to withdraw from the CCP or the organizations associated with it. To date, over 89 million Chinese in China and around the world have done so.

China has never before seen a group successfully resist the CCP and never before seen a peaceful campaign of civil disobedience such as that staged by Falun Gong practitioners.

Their example has awakened in the Chinese people the desire to defend their rights. A “rights defense movement” has appeared that has no individual leader but only a conviction shared among the population that they will no longer accept oppression.

The Chinese people hungry for freedom today are not seeking money or power. They simply want a life free of communist dictatorship.

Michael Young is a Chinese-American writer based in Washington, D.C., who writes on China and the Sino-U.S. relationship.