Dystopia in the East

The first of three parts

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party plan a day of celebration.

As they do, millions in Hong Kong await a new and greater Tiananmen Square massacre. They fear another murderous repression because Hong Kong citizens had the temerity to demand that the Communist Party keep its Treaty promise to maintain democracy within the former British colony for at least 50 years. A city of millions raised free is seeing its liberties stolen to serve Beijing’s insatiable hunger for control over the lives of others.

Muslim Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province are being “re-educated” by the millions in camps employing the tried-and-true methods of torture and brainwashing. The stated goal is nothing less than the elimination of a distinct cultural and religious nation through unrelenting thought-control, backed up by a slow-going but meticulous physical genocide.

Outside of these camps, a surveillance state that makes Orwell’s “1984” seem loose and amateurish has been built in partnership with U.S. Tech companies. Ubiquitous cameras and microphones employ artificial intelligence and facial recognition technologies to monitor and track almost everything that individuals do and say. This data is converted into a “Social Credit Score,” wherein loyalty is rewarded and conscience is punished. Imagine a city without doors and window coverings, or a language without the word no. That is what the Communist Party has built in Xinjiang, and is spreading everywhere that they rule.

Everyday Chinese within the People’s Republic have been encouraged to tolerate Communist Party control because a variant of Free Market Enterprise has radically improved the physical standard of living within certain Chinese cities. The deal has been simple, give up all political expression in return for an ever-increasing prosperity. However, as the nature of the global economy shifts against Chinese competitiveness for the first time since the 1970s, the Communist Party can no longer ensure an ever-more-plush lifestyle in these regions. In fact, economic reality may prevent even the maintenance of current living standards.

Because of this, no matter how mighty the Communist Party seems in its propaganda, the reality is that they are both weak and afraid. Since 1989, they have known that everyday Chinese have been patiently waiting for the death of the old generation of leaders who ordered the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Xi Jinping has so far managed to perpetuate their Totalitarian style of rule into the next generation.

However, no thinking Communist Party leader actually believes that they have the loyalty of most Chinese citizens. They have been allowed to rule on sufferance, tolerated because they did preside over a marked improvement in material well-being while simultaneously crushing all real or imagined dissent with conspicuous brutality.

Consider the persecution of the Falun-Gong meditation technique. Mass arrests of practitioners of this peaceful variant of Tai-Chi have been followed by the mass-harvesting of their organs to be sold on the Black Market. The victims of this horror either die or live on in a half-life, depending upon the momentary needs of the international market in fresh replacement organs.

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Ralph K. Ginorio teaches history at Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy. Part Two in the series will be published Wednesday.