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Monday, May 4, 2020

China and Communism through the Lens of Tiananmen Square


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

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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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