Image: scmp adapted by @tibettruth

As Chinese police today fired live rounds at protesters in Hong Kong what a disturbing yet utterly appropriate reminder that 70 years ago today a regime was born that inflicted genocidal suffering upon its own people through insane ideological policies. The so-called Great Leap Forwards, in truth it plunged China’s people backwards into a feudal condition, tortured by famine and environmental catastrophe. Millions perished as a consequence of the crazed dogma of the Chinese communist party ruler-ship. The misery was extended by the harrowing excesses of what was laughingly described as a Cultural Revolution, the only culture which prevailed was one of terror, thought-control, mass arrests, labor-camps and countless numbers of people murdered or broken enduring the misery of prison. This brutal state-approved and engineered madness was inflicted across not only across China, but brutalized too the occupied territories of Tibet, East Turkistan, Southern Mongolia and Manchuria. The destruction ran wild year-after year, families destroyed, monasteries dynamited, culture targeted for violent assimilation.

Image: cnn

Nixon trumpeted a rapprochement with China, the CIA pulled the funding of Tibetan resistance fighters, the great betrayal had fallen. After Mao a respite, some hope flickered of an easing, but that proved to be illusory. The decade of the 1980s arrived bringing cynical moves of Deng Xiaoping and a supposed opening of the Chinese market, much was made of the economic reforms. Companies across the world licked their lips, while the machinery of terror remained, to maintain control for China’s corrupt authorities. The draconian policies continued, mass campaigns of forced sterilizations, censorship and a vicious denial of human rights were enforced. During 1987 through 1989 Tibetans again rose against Chinese rule, and the tanks rumbled past the Potala Palace. Many were shot, more tortured and disappeared. Then in the Summer of that last year Chinese students massed around a beacon for a democratic China, their dreams bled across the cold stones of Tiananmen Square following a government ordered massacre. As the blood was being washed away the US Administration was covertly arranging an emergency visit to Beijing, its envoy to reassure the Chinese authorities that business would not be interrupted.

Image: thestar

Economic growth and the opening of Chinese markets witnessed throughout the 1990s a global rush to trade with China. The scent of money was on the wind and western corporations, backed by their governments wanted some of that profitable action. The human rights violations persisted, as did the oppression and tyranny, under the approving rule of Jiang Zemin. When questions were raised about doing business with a Chinese state that abused and tortured the response was to insist that ‘constructive engagement’ would result in progress. That economic liberalization would be followed by an improvement on civil freedoms and human rights. That was another deception. In 2001 China was admitted into the World Trade Organization and since that time its economy has risen to a position of global dominance, not without a creeping realization that there was a troubling cost to such expansion.

Image: chinanews/adapted for accuracy by @tibettruth

Along with the consumerism and commercial revolution, which in part has transformed Chinese society, China’s regime under, then President, Hu Jintao consolidated it’s power. While the world applauded China’s miraculous economic rise and salivated at the prospect of trade the denial of basic freedoms persisted. Torture, executions and prison camps maintained the social ‘harmony’. A condition inherited by the current glorious leader Xi Jinping, like Emperor Nero he has assumed the mantle of a supreme being. What cosmetic scraps of political accountability that previously linked his office to the Chinese communist party were swiftly abandoned. This dictatorship is engineering a new China, intensifying totalitarian control, extending state surveillance into every area of society, constructing more detention camps, dispatching thought-control police onto the streets. There exists only one truth according to this new cult; loyalty to the leader and complete obedience and devotion to the communist party of China.

Image: chinanews

Today Xi Jinping observed a mass military parade in Beijing. The choreographed thousands dutifully waved their flags, as the jackboots, missiles and tanks paraded in celebration. In Hong Kong the bullets were flying. Seventy years have passed, the brutalized people of Tibet, East Turkistan, Southern Mongolia, Manchuria, Hong Kong and China are asking how few are left for this corrupt and genocidal regime?