Emulating Chinese Communist Party Methods in US

Chinese paramilitary police walk on the Bund promenade along the Huangpu river in the Huangpu district in Shanghai, China, on June 15, 2023. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

Some members of the political elite in the United States and other Western countries seem to admire the methods used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in pursuing their own versions of manipulating and suppressing domestic dissent.

The United States appears to be jettisoning some of the constitutional protections guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution in an accelerating emulation of CCP-style methods by weaponizing the federal government against political dissent.

Let us examine the topic and draw some comparisons.

The Big Egg Roll

The First Amendment in the U.S. Bill of Rights is No.1 for a reason: America’s Founding Fathers knew from their direct experiences that free political speech is the best check on a tyrannical central government. The Second Amendment is No. 2 because the right to bear arms enforces the free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.

In contrast, the preamble of the Chinese Constitution is completely silent on the rights of Chinese citizens. Instead, it focuses on describing the provisions by which the central government (under the direction of the CCP) will facilitate “achieving socialist modernization along the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

The CCP fears the Chinese people because the Party illegitimately rules China.

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The CCP tightly controls the Chinese population, society, economy, and military through an extensive domestic security apparatus, including internal police and informants, a state-run media that conveys what is acceptable and not in terms of public narratives, a corrupt communist bureaucracy that attempts to control most aspects of daily life, an ever-expanding hi-tech social controls system that surveils and monitors the behavior of Chinese citizens, and other measures intended to perpetuate the rule of the CCP by identifying, punishing, and squelching any dissent to CCP orthodoxy and policies.

Article 3 of the Chinese Constitution mandates that all state institutions operate under the communist principle of “democratic centralism.” That principle mixes oil and water: free and open discussion (democracy) and party unity and discipline (central control). The CCP’s iron fist determines what is permitted in China; “democracy with Chinese characteristics” amounts to a police state.

While the constitution itself “guarantees” the rights of Chinese citizens (Article 35: “freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration” and Article 36: “freedom of religious belief”), what Chinese citizen would risk the provisions of Article 37, which states that “No citizen shall be arrested unless with the approval or by the decision of a people’s procuratorate or by the decision of a people’s court, and arrests must be made by a public security organ”? People’s courts are the kangaroo courts run by the CCP. And then there are the “public security organs.”

The internal Chinese police apparatus of the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) monitors and punishes any dissenters from CCP narratives of the policies that are endlessly propagandized by CCP bureaucrats and state-run Chinese media.

As noted by the China Leadership Monitor, “[the central government] department responsible for domestic political spying, section no. 1 or the no. 1 department, of the MPS and the Public Security Bureaus (PSBs), is the ‘political-security protection’ (zhengzhi anquan baowei) unit, China’s domestic secret police.” This department is also “No. 1” for a reason: The CCP views the mission of crushing domestic dissent as the most important state and domestic policing function in China because this is what preserves and perpetuates the CCP regime.

The mission of the “No. 1 department” and its subordinate PSBs is “to collect and analyze intelligence, detect and act against individuals and cases that endanger social and political stability as well as national security, target religious and ethnic groups, strengthen security in academic institutions and state-affiliated entities, and recruit informants.”

To execute this mission, this gargantuan police apparatus includes tens of thousands of informants and is similar to the domestic police and spying operations in other totalitarian regimes, for example, the Gestapo in Nazi Germany and the NKVD/KGB in Soviet Russia. Once a person is targeted as a potential “enemy of the state,” persecution, lengthy terms of confinement, and forced rehabilitation are inevitable. The Tibetans, Uyghurs, Falun Gong adherents, and other minority groups have felt the brunt of these measures.

The authority for the MPS and MSS is derived from Article 28 of the Chinese Constitution: “The state shall maintain public order, suppress treason and other criminal activities that jeopardize national security, punish criminal activities, including those that endanger public security or harm the socialist economy, and punish and reform criminals.”

These provisions are arbitrarily interpreted and enforced by the CCP. Chinese who dare to question CCP leaders or government policies are dealt with harshly because there are no free speech rights and protections in China, and public security is empowered to surveil, monitor, and deal harshly with all dissenters.

US Emulates the Chinese Domestic Surveillance State

Since the passage of the “Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism” (PATRIOT) Act in October 2001, provisions of that legislation have been used to expand the federal government’s domestic surveillance of American citizens. These expanding surveillance powers are directly at odds with Americans’ privacy rights and the First Amendment. Federal agencies have been weaponized to target and suppress political dissent.

Pro-Trump protesters, including Proud Boys leader Joe Biggs (plaid shirt at the bottom center of the frame,) gather in front of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Jon Cherry/Getty Images)

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has been repurposed to indict, bankrupt, convict, jail, and eliminate political opponents. Thousands of nonviolent political protestors (deemed by the DOJ and the FBI to be “J6 insurrections”) have been pursued for years for what amounts to the misdemeanor of criminal trespass, which is not even considered to be a serious crime in many states.

This ongoing federal manhunt continues three years after the fact while the perpetrators, organizers, and financial backers of the BLM riots in 2020 have largely either not been pursued or, if prosecuted, received light sentences despite the over $2 billion in property damage alone delivered by those violent rioters.

The DOJ has employed lawfare to target and eliminate political opponents through civil lawsuits, federal and state indictments under questionable or little-used statutes, ballot removal lawsuits, and attempts to disqualify state electors. This amounts to the kind of system used in China to ensure that only CCP-approved candidates can be “elected.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has become a testing ground for monitoring Americans’ communications and a means of suppressing political speech. One example was the “Disinformation Governance Board,” which was established and abruptly shut down in 2022 to suppress political speech. Other initiatives include public-private partnerships in which DHS can restrict “unwanted” political speech by transferring limited agency powers to private companies to act as de facto government agents.

For example, DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) partnered with the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to track and counter “what they considered to be misinformation and disinformation” during the 2020 campaign, as reported by RealClearInvestigations. All of these activities violate the First Amendment and smack of Chinese communist methods to suppress dissent.

The FBI also illegally transferred limited government power to a private company when the agency colluded with X, formerly Twitter, over several years to suppress free speech deemed undesirable by the Democratic Party, as reported by Newsweek.

The federal government has also facilitated the creation of the censorship industry, consisting of federal agencies, Big Tech, and Big Media, to suppress “undesirable” political narratives, facts, and information, as summarized by the Foundation for Freedom Online. These private entities have become extensions of the federal government in much the same way the CCP controls and directs all political expression throughout Chinese society.

Concluding Thoughts

Creeping authoritarianism modeled after the Chinese surveillance state appears to be the way ahead for the United States despite constitutional challenges to government overreach. The arbitrary suppression of U.S. political speech by the federal government is a new phenomenon in the United States, which would doubtless shock the Founding Fathers who wrote the First Amendment.

States have gotten into the suppression of political speech game, too. The Rutherford Institute reported that there are “at least 205 proposed laws in 45 states aimed at curtailing the right to peacefully assemble and protest by expanding the definition of rioting, heightening penalties for existing offenses, or creating new crimes associated with assembly.” Those who are pushing these unconstitutional laws have been instrumental in developing new concepts to violate First Amendment rights and suppress dissent, including free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, and hate crime laws.

The ability of average Americans to “speak truth to power” used to be a moral imperative guaranteed by the First Amendment that set the United States apart from most other countries in the world. The U.S. federal government is headed down the path of creating an American version of China’s Police Security Bureaus and informant networks to target and suppress those who exercise that right. Beware!

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.