The
uprising at Tiananmen Square in 1989 is yet another clue that modern China has
shed most of her Communist ideology (i.e., leading/joining an international
revolution of the property-less proletariat against the bourgeoise property
owners). Dr Vladimir Moss writes,
. . .
Another problem faced by Deng Xiaoping
concerned economic policy and its political effects. As Naomi Klein writes, the
government “was obsessed with avoiding a repeat of what had just happened in
Poland, where workers had been allowed to form an independent movement that
challenged the party’s monopoly hold on power. It was not that China’s leaders
were committed to protecting the state-owned factories and farm communes that
formed the foundation of the Communist state. In fact, Deng was
enthusiastically committed to a corporate-based economy – so committed that, in
1980, his government invited Milton Friedman to come to China and tutor
hundreds of top-level civil servants, professors and party economists in the
fundamentals of free-market theory. ‘All were invited guests, who had to show a
ticket of invitation to attend,’ Friedman recalled of his audiences in Beijing
and Shanghai. His central message was ‘how much better ordinary people lived in
capitalist than in communist countries’. The example he held up was Hong Kong,
a zeon of pure capitalism that Friedman had long admired for its ‘dynamic,
innovative character that has been produced by personal liberty, free trade,
low taxes, and minimal government intervention.’ He claimed that Hong Kong,
despite having no democracy, was freer than the United States, since its
government participated less in the economy.
“Friedman’s definition of freedom, in
which political freedoms were incidental, even unnecessary, compared with the
freedom of unrestricted commerce, conformed nicely with the vision taking shape
in the Chinese Politburo. The party wanted to open the economy to private
ownership and consumerism while maintaining its own grip on power – a plan that
ensured that once the assets of the state were auctioned off, party officials
and their relatives would snap up the best deals and be first in line for the
biggest profits. According to this version of ‘transition’, the same people who
controlled the state under Communism would control it under capitalism, while
enjoying a substantial upgrade in lifestyle. The model the Chinese government
intended to emulate was not the United States but something much closer to
Chile under Pinochet: free markets combined with authoritarian political
control, enforced by iron-fisted repression.
“From the start Deng clearly understood
that repression would be crucial. Under Mao, the Chinese state had exerted
brutal control over the people, dispensing with opponents and sending
dissidents for re-education. But Mao’s repression took place in the name of the
workers and against the bourgeoisie; now the party was going to launch its own
counterrevolution and ask workers to give up many of their benefits and
security so that a minority could collect huge profits. It was not going to be
an easy task. So, in 1983, as Deng opened up the country to foreign investment
and reduced protections for workers, he also ordered the creation of the
400,000-strong People’s Armed Police, a new, roving riot squad charged with
quashing all signs of ‘economic crimes’ (i.e., strikes and protests). According
to the China historian Maurice Meisner, ‘The People’s Armed Police kept
American helicopters and electric cattle prods in its arsenal.’ And ‘several
units were sent to Poland for anti-riot training’ – where they studied the tactics
that had been used against Solidarity during Poland’s period of martial law.
“Many of Deng’s reforms were successful
and popular – farmers had more control over their lives, and commerce returned
to the cities. But in the late eighties, Deng began introducing measures that
were distinctly unpopular, particularly among workers in the cities – price
controls were lifted, sending prices soaring; job security was eliminated,
creating waves of unemployment; and deep inequalities were opening up between the
winners and losers in the new China. By 1988, the party was confronting a
powerful backlash and was forced to reverse some of its price deregulation.
Outrage was also mounting in the face of the party’s defiant corruption and
nepotism. Many Chinese citizens wanted more freedom in the market, but ‘reform’
increasingly looked like code for party officials turning into business
tycoons, as many illegally took possession of the assets they had previously
managed as bureaucrats.
“With the free-market experiment in peril,
Milton Friedman was once again invited to pay a visit to China – much as the
Chicago Boys and the piranhas had enlisted his help in 1973, when their program
had sparked an internal revolt in Chile. A high-profile visit from the world-famous
guru of capitalism was just the boost China’s ‘reformers’ needed.
“When Friedman and his wife, Rose, arrived
in Shanghai in September 1988, they were dazzled by how quickly mainland China
was beginning to look and feel like Hong Kong. Despite the rage simmering at
the grass roots, everything they saw served to confirm ‘out faith in the power
of free markets’. Friedman described this moment as ‘the most hopeful period of
the Chinese experiment’.
“In the presence of official state media,
Friedman met for two hours with Zhao Ziyang, general secretary of the Communist
Party, as well as with Jiang Zemin, then party secretary of the Shanghai
Committee and the future Chinese president. Friedman’s message to Jiang echoed
the advice he had given to Pinochet when the Chilean project was on the skids:
don’t bow to the pressure and don’t blink. ‘I emphasized the importance of
privatization and free markets, and of liberalizing at one fell stroke,’
Friedman recalled. In a memo to the general secretary of the Communist Party,
Friedman stressed that more, not less, shock therapy was needed. ‘China’s
initial steps of reform have been dramatically successful. China can make
further dramatic progress by placing still further reliance on free private markets.’…
“Friedman’s trip did not have the desired
results. The pictures in the official papers of the professor offering his
blessing to party bureaucrats did not succeed in bringing the public onside. In
subsequent months, protests grew more determined and radical. The most visible
symbols of the opposition were the demonstrations by student strikers in
Tiananmen Square. Thse historic protests were almost universally portrayed in
the international media as a clash between modern, idealistic students who wanted
Western-style democratic freedoms and old-guard authoritarians who wanted to
protect the Communist state. Recently, another analysis of the meaning of
Tiananmen has emerged, one that challenges the mainstream version while putting
Friedmanism at the heart of the story. This alternative narrative is being
advanced by, among others, Wang Hui, one of the organizers of the 1989
protests, and now a leading Chinese intellectual of what is known as China’s
‘New Left’. In his 2003 book, China’s New
Order, Wang explains that the protesters spanned a huge range of Chinese
society – not just elite university students by also factory workers, small
entrepreneurs and teachers. What ignited the protests, he recalls, was popular
discontent in the face of Deng’s ‘revolutionary’ economic changes which were
lowering wages, raising prices and causing ‘a crisis of layoffs and
unemployment’. According to Wang, ‘These changes were the catalyst for the 1989
social mobilization’.
. . .
“There were signs for a moment that the
government might not be able to impose its will, but the army’s reliability was
soon assured. The repression which followed was ruthless. The student leaders
had move the focus of their efforts to an encampment in Peking in Tiananmen Square, where, thirty years before, Mao had
proclaimed the foundation of the People’s Republic. From one of the gates of
the old Forbidden City a huge portrait of him looked down on the symbol of the
protesters: a plastic figure of a ‘Goddess of Democracy’, deliberately
evocative of New York’s Statue of Liberty. On 2 June the first military units
entered the suburbs of Peking on their way to the square. There was resistance
with extemporized weapons and barricades. They forced their way through. On 4
June the students and a few sympathizers were overcome by rifle-fire, teargas,
and a brutal crushing of the encampment under the treads of tanks which swept
into the square. Killing went on for some days, mass arrests followed (perhaps
as many as ten thousand in all). Much of what happened took place before the
eyes of the world, thanks to the presence of film-crews in Peking which had for
days familiarized television audiences with the demonstrators’ encampment.
Foreign disapproval was almost universal…”
“For Deng and the rest of the Politburo,
the free-market possibilities were now limitless. Just as Pinochet’s terror had
cleared the streets for revolutionary change, so Tiananmen paved the way for a
radical transformation free from fear of rebellion. If life grew harder for
peasants and workers, they would either have to accept it quietly or face the
wrath of the army and the secret police. And so, with the public in a state of
raw terror, Deng rammed through his most sweeping reforms yet.
“Before Tiananmen, he had been forced to
ease off some of the more painful measures: three months after the massacre, he
brought them back; and he implemented several of Friedman’s other
recommendations, including price deregulation. For Wang Hui, there is an
obvious reason why ‘market reforms that had failed to be implemented in the
late 1980s just happened to have been completed in the post-1989 environment’;
the reason, he writes, ‘is that the violence of 1989 served to check the social
upheaval brought about by this process, and the new pricing system finally took
shape.’ The shock of the massacre, in other words, made shock therapy possible.
. . .
“For foreign investors and the party, it
has been a win-win arrangement. According to a 2006 study, 80 percent of
China’s billionaires (calculated in Chinese yuan) are the children of Communist
Party officials. Roughly twenty-nine hundred of these party scions – known as
‘the princelings’ – control $260 billion. It is a mirror of the corporatist
state first pioneered in Chile under Pinochet: a revolving door between
corporate and political elites who combine their power to eliminate workers as
an organised political force. Today, the collaborative arrangement can be seen
in the way that foreign multinational media and technology companies help the
Chinese state to spy on its citizens, and to make sure that when students do
Web searches or phrases like ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre’, or even ‘democracy’,
no documents turn up. ‘The creation of today’s market society was not the
result of a sequence of spontaneous events,’ writes Wang Hui, ‘but rather of
state interference and violence’.”
. . .
It
should be clear to honest folks that China is no longer a Communist
country. Repressive? Yes.
Violent? Yes. But so is the [u]nited States government in
Washington City, if any will take a minute to look. What, then, explains the belligerence of an
array of supposed conservatives - ranging from Sens Cotton and Graham to Frank
Gaffney to Bishop E. W. Jackson - to China?
Because China is encroaching on the global empire that the [u]nited
States alone has ruled since the end of World War II and especially since the
end of the Cold War. Both entities are
driven by Godless, materialistic ideologies that seek to build utopia on earth
(the thin, rotten veneer of Churchianity in most of the States only helps make
the point). The clash between the two,
to borrow from Jay Dyer, is simply a way for the Transnational Elite to break
and remold the world into the image they want, as they did with WWI, WWII, the
Cold War, and the ‘War on Terror’. Both
ideologies and their supporting nation-states, China and the Puritan America,
are forerunners of Antichrist. Whoever
comes out on top when the dust settles from their fight will still lose their
souls. How much better would it be for
the peoples of the world for the restoration of the Holy Tsar in Orthodox
Russia, to which all could look for truth, justice, beauty, and many other
blessings?
Of the
fact that Holy Russia is still alive despite the continued reign of atheism in
Russia, we have the testimony now of many observers in Russia itself.
Here is hat Gennady Shimanov says:
“Holy
Russia cannot be buried, it cannot pass away; it is eternal and victorious, and
it is precisely to it that the final word in the history of our people will
belong.... Holy Russia went away only from the surface of contemporary
life, but it continues to live in its hidden depths, germinating until the
time, so that in the time pleasing to God, having survived the winter, it will
again break through to the surface and adorn the face of the Russian land,
which has been so cruelly lashed by fiery and icy storms” [The Orthodox Word,
1973, no. 50, p. 98].
6. RUSSIA'S MESSAGE TO THE
WORLD
In the
book which most thoroughly describes the events to occur at the end of the world,
the Apocalypse of St. John the Theologian, at the opening of the seventh seal,
which precedes the final plague to come upon mankind; it is said that there was
silence in heaven for the space of half an hour [Apoc 8:1]. Some have
interpreted this to mean a short period of peace before the final events o
world history — namely, the short period of the restoration of Russia, when the
preaching of world-wide repentance will begin with Russia — that “new, ultimate
word” which even Dostoyevsky hoped Russia would give to the world [Pushkin
Speech, The Diary of a Writer, tr. Boris Brasol, New York, George Braziller,
1954, p. 980]. Under present world conditions, when the events of one
country are known to the whole world almost instantly, and when Russia, cleansed
by the blood of its martyrs, indeed has a better chance than any other country
to awake from the sleep of atheism and unbelief — we can already conceive the
possibility of such an event. As Father Dimitry Dudko and others have
said, it cannot be that the blood of Russia's innumerable martyrs will be in
vain; undoubtedly it is the seed of the last great flowering of true
Christianity
--From St Seraphim Rose of
Platina, Ca., ‘The Future of Russia and the End of the World’ (1981), http://www.desertwisdom.org/dttw/truth/fr-seraphim-rose/russia.html
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England,
South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð,
unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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