Hu Jintao’s three-year reign for the people of China and others beyond her borders have been troubled times.
While in these times the democracy movement and the freedom it spurs have expanded around the world, much to the detriment and isolation of regimes both autocratic and communist, we still see the likes of dictators refusing to bow to the will of history. Nothing short of humanity itself loses out. Witness the terrorist activities of communist nations escalating, just as grows their will—which seemingly goes unchecked—to infiltrate and control the free world.
The Epoch Times’s publication Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party has shown itself to be, amidst all this, an original and compelling force—one poised to undo all that is unfortunate about China’s regime. It has done the unthinkable in loosening the grip held by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over China’s expat communities and stirred the souls of millions in mainland China. The veritable tide of renunciations that has followed, a collective shedding of the shackles, constitutes the single greatest challenge to the CCP yet known. To date a staggering 4 million plus have made the break.
The CCP is not able to meet the challenge, and so we see a reversion to its hallmark tactics: propaganda and threat of force. Inside China, the Party has fanned the flames of patriotic sentiments with an “Anti-Secession Law” on Taiwan while rekindling and refocusing old antipathy toward America and Japan. Outside of China, Hu Jintao wished at first to follow Deng Xiaoping’s advice to “keep a low profile and never take the lead.” Hu, sensing global anxiety over China’s ascent, spawned the saying “peaceful rise.” The charming façade, however, was soon dismantled by the CCP’s own in the form of warmongering by general Zhu Chenghu—who threatened the U.S. with nuclear warfare—and Tang Chunfeng—who threatened Japan. Statements such as these bespeak of an internal crisis of escalating proportions, fomented by the Commentaries, with which the CCP feels it must desperately cope.
Such is the context of the first ever visit of President Hu Jintao—the man who now holds power over the Party, the government, and the military in China—to the United States.
When former ruler Jiang Zemin stepped down from power, the people of China, uncertain about the old regime, were full of hope over the new Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao led regime. In the three years that have come to pass, the image Hu and Wen projected—that of a diligent leadership close to the people—has hardly been made real. Tellingly, when Hu put forth the agenda of his U.S. visit, scarcely did he honor host Bush’s wishes to discuss substantial issues such as China’s military threat, energy, North Korea’s nuclear weapons, trade disputes, or human rights violations. Hu was instead preoccupied with ensuring sufficient fanfare and displays of stately majesty on his visit.
Hu’s performance has been disappointing through and through. Let down are all who had once banked on Hu to usher in reform. Yet Hu is still in power, and it is not as of yet too late for the leader to mend his ways. It is time he break from entrenched ways and try a fresh approach: to accept the sound advice of those he governs.
A Persecution Goes Unabated
Jiang Zemin once vowed to fix “the Falun Gong problem” in three months. That fix—a violent program of suppression—has turned into a nightmare for Jiang and his followers. They meet with marches and protests from the Falun Gong at every turn when traveling beyond China, even being sued in multiple courts. They don’t dare to so much as receive documents from foreign officials nowadays, so paranoid are they of being subpoenaed for their crimes against humanity.
Upon coming to power Hu Jintao was in position to correct the terrible brutality perpetrated by the CCP; he could have even had Jiang, who launched the suppression of Falun Gong, brought to justice. He could have joined the ranks of Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang, who gained popular support for making peace out of chaos; Hu could have bolstered his status and gained valuable political capital. But to this day, Hu has done nothing of the sort. Time and again he has failed to achieve anything. Then it stands to reason to ask: Is Hu Jintao just irresolute? Or is Hu at odds with the people, a supporter of the CCP’s program of suppression?
According to incomplete statistics, from the time between Hu’s election as General Secretary of the CCP to this writing, some 1,500 adherents of the Falun Gong are known to have died from the CCP’s persecution. And in the time since Hu assumed power over the Party and the military in September of 2004, at least 629 Falun Gong prisoners of conscience have lost their lives while in state custody.
During each of Jiang Zemin’s visits to democratic countries, the Falun Gong’s right of protest was curbed as government leaders bowed to CCP pressure. In this regard Hu Jintao picked up where Jiang left off. When Hu visited France in January of 2004, Falun Gong practitioners gathered to urge Hu to stop the suppression and hold Jiang accountable for his crimes. Yet what unfolded but participants being taken into custody by French police and interrogated. French newspapers questioned President Jacques Chirac’s motives and speculated as to just how much economic interests were at work.
While we don’t know what Hu is thinking at present, one thing is clear: The days are passing, and lives continue to be lost. The crimes of Jiang’s regime are with time becoming the legacy of Hu and his group. If Hu continues to support the tyranny or at least does not bring it to a halt, which would be the right thing to do, it is sure to prove costly. Hu will be marked in kind as one of the arch criminals who persecuted Falun Gong.
Squelching Free Speech
The intensity with which the press and the Internet are suppressed in China has swiftly increased under the rule of Hu Jintao.
Many staff of the Southern Metropolis Daily, the Southern Weekend and the Window on the South—Chinese newspapers of the Nanfang Daily Press Group, known for honest and courageous reporting—have been sacked in recent years. For instance, Yu Huafeng, the former Deputy-editor and General Manager of the Southern Metropolis Daily, was sentenced to 8 years in prison under Hu. Meanwhile staff at Beijing News, 21st Century Business Herald, China’s Reform, Stratagem and Management, China Chronicle and other newspapers have been manipulated by outside bodies on political grounds. In early 2005 the educational magazine The Teacher’s Friend was ordered shut down and three editors dismissed on grounds that the publication “pays undue attention to ideology.”
The CCP has dealt with foreign-based websites by means of a two-pronged, or hard and soft, approach. The CCP allows Web access to those sites who prove compliant to Party dictates while blocking in full the sites of others. Yahoo has shown itself to be of the former sort, submitting to the CCP’s demands, while search engine giants such as Google have followed in kind by filtering out news and sites that the CCP wishes to block. Domestic websites that express diverse political views, meanwhile, have been closed down. A few years back several dozen websites in support of freedom and democracy were based in China. But towards the end of September and early October of 2003, Chinese authorities in the Hu administration closed down most every one of the sites. In March of 2005, the CCP’s Ministry of Education ordered several universities to regulate their online discussion boards, and went so far as to shutdown sites on the campuses of Beijing University, Qinghua University, Nankai University, Fudan University, and Wuhan University.
As all information channels inside China are monitored—with “sensitive” words, subjects, and sites even being blocked—some Internet writers have opted to publish articles on websites based outside of the mainland only to meet with arrest. A number of writers and editors have been punished or sentenced for their remarks, among whom are counted Zhao Yan, Shi Tao, Qing Shuijun, Yang Tianshui, Zhen Yichun, Zhang Lin, Du Daobing.
On May 3, 2005, the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders issued an “Enemies of Press Freedom” list citing 34 leaders and organizations that are responsible for violations of press freedom. China’s Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin were listed in the 2004 report among the top ten “greatest enemies of press freedom.” They share the distinction with the likes of Kim Jong-il and Fidel Castro. The organization’s “Worldwide Press freedom Index” ranks China fifth from the very bottom of its list; in the Asia region China came out only slightly better than North Korea and Burma. Saudi Arabia fared better.
According to the organization, 107 journalists worldwide are currently imprisoned for merely doing their jobs. At least 27 of those persons—fully one quarter of the total—are in China. As of this January 1, China was the world’s worst jailer of journalists. Many journalists who factored prominently in establishing this very paper have been jailed; several remain behind bars to this day, some serving sentences as long as ten years.
Backsliding Rights
The appearance Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao gave upon taking office was one of closeness to the people. They were said to concern themselves with the problems of China’s farmers and rural society, unlike their predecessors. And in this vein, in early 2004 the CCP announced that the agriculture tax would be gradually reduced, disappearing completely within five years.
But as of today Chinese farmers have yet to see any tax cuts whatsoever. Quite to the contrary, in that same span of time most agriculture materials and consumables have witnessed large price hikes in China according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics. Fertilizer costs increased 20 percent, with the price of agricultural chemicals and diesel fuel similarly seeing large markups. These factors combine to nullify any benefits the tax cut might bring. And China’s farmers still live at the mercy of corrupt local officials and powerbrokers who embezzle land. The farmers, more desperate than just a few short years before, have been forced to lodge appeals of complaint with higher authorities and take to public protest.
According to a 2003 survey by China’s Bureau of Appeals, the Party and administrative appeals processing departments in China received almost 13 million in-person or mailed appeals. In the spring of 2004, written appeals received by the State Bureau of Appeals increased 20.2 percent over the figure for the same period during the previous year; the number of groups appealing and people involved increased almost 100 percent overall, and by 94.9 percent compared to the same period the previous year. It stands to reason that figures for 2005 are still higher again.
Faced with such growing discontent, the Hu-Wen administration published a new set of “Regulations on Appealing” in January of 2005. Regrettably, rather than regulating to meet growing concerns of the populace, the new measures in fact repeal the right to directly petition the central government. The move in effect puts would-be-appellants at the mercy of oft-corrupt local officials—the very source, typically, of the appellants grievance.
For example, item 18 of the new regulations stipulates that for a group to lodge an appeal, “people should elect representatives, and the number of representatives shall not exceed five.” In effect a meeting must be held to elect representatives, a fact which in turn puts those involved at risk: local CCP officials can easily brand the gathered group an “illegal assembly.” Item 20 meanwhile states that persons who lodge an appeal cannot assemble outside a “public area around State buildings” nor stay too long in the appeals office reception area. This in effect gives the CCP’s Public Security Department grounds to arrest at will persons who create supposed “group disturbances to a State institution” and prosecute them under criminal law. The new regulations are clearly not meant to help people resolve their challenges, but to instead block them from appealing. The Central CCP regulation on “blockages by appeal” is itself in violation of China’s Constitution [editor’s note; in order to secure their post, local CCP officials often use local public security forces to prevent people from going to the central government appeal office, in Chinese the term is called ‘Appeal Blockage’].
Blocking channels of appeal can only bring about new problems that will prove harder to handle than the large number of appeals formerly lodged at the Party and national-level offices. As we anticipated, during the first half year of the new regulations many state-society conflicts erupted. On June 11, 2005, armed mobs—acting in cahoots with corrupt local officials—attacked the temporary shelters of protesting farmers in Shengyou village, Hebei province. Unarmed farmers were beaten fiercely. Gunshots and an explosion were heard. In all six villagers were killed and over a hundred wounded in the assault.
Not long after, farmers in Sanshangang village, Guangdong province, had a harsh confrontation with local CCP officials who had seized and destroyed the farmers’ private property. In early July, villagers from neighboring areas came to support the farmers, with roughly a thousand villagers surrounding the town’s police station. The Public Security Bureau had to mobilize 600 armed police to dispel the villagers. Violent conflict erupted at the scene. The conflicts share one feature: most of those who were appealing had before been regular visitors to the CCP’s National Bureau of Appeals. In recent months, however, following the Hu administration’s new strictures, these same persons were often seized by local CCP officials at train stations, bus terminals, en route to lodge appeals at the national level (now forbidden). Local officials are implicated by the policy themselves, as to not seize appellants on way to Beijing would be to risk repercussions. The Hu regime considers it an “embarrassment” to have defiant citizens insist on lodging appeals in the capitol.
Conflicts of this sort are causing a crisis of legitimacy not often detected behind the current facade of prosperity; the conflicts have economic bearing as well. All of this combined with the wave of CCP renunciations set off by the Nine Commentaries announces that the CCP’s outdated and dictatorial political doctrines are a failure. The shortsightedness of Deng Xiaoping and power-lust of Jiang Zemin meant for decades that the reclamation of moral values and political reforms so badly needed in China (following the Cultural Revolution) were put on hold. Today a change in policy is badly overdue.
To Hu Jintao, we say: Wake up! If Hu doesn’t abandon the dictatorship and its mindset and instead stays on with the CCP’s sinking ship, not only will he be discarded by the forces of history, but the nation of China could well be plunged into a new cycle of chaos and fail to establish itself among the world’s democratic nations.
Being so at odds with what is human or humane, a terrorist regime if ever there was one, China’s Communist Party is condemned to fall, and that fall will be to the benefit of all of China’s people. Hu Jintao should know that no one person, even be he a nation’s leader, can stop the wheels of history. A choice has been presented to Hu: To be buried with the CCP, cast-off like the former Romanian ruler Nicolae Ceausescu, or to set aside his own self-interest and, acting for the benefit of China and her people, abandon the CCP, leading China on the road to a long and stable period of development.
China needs a great leader. The future will give her a great leader. If Hu Jintao is not up to the task, another—this time a hero—will be there to replace him.
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