The following are some Excerpts of

Living Without Freedom in China

June 2007
Vol. 12, No. 20

By Edward Friedman

It’s not easy for American students to know what it means to live without freedom. They know all the bad things about their own country—Virginia Tech, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the Enron and Halliburton scandals, the LA riots, elections stolen, federal attorneys fired for pursuing criminals rather than a political agenda, etc. How democratic is America?, they cynically wonder. When you tell them how awful these other places are, they ask, aren’t you just whitewashing your own society. [ …]

China is a [malevolent] superpower. Its economy is rising, its military is rising [against  other countries, and occasionally its own citizens] and Chinese people in surveys are more popular in most countries of the world than are Americans right now. China’s going to be using this money to serve certain purposes. Among them are undercutting the power of the United States, democracy and human rights and supporting authoritarian regimes. Whether it’s Sudan or Nigeria, they can buy up the oil and governments don’t have to listen to any kind of international pressure about conforming to human rights. China has already defeated the international human rights regime.

China’s rise means that freedom is in trouble. The era we’re in is very much like the era after WWI. Authoritarian models are rising and are becoming more attractive. I can imagine a future in which unregulated hedge funds lead to an international financial crisis and this is seen as coming out of the Anglo-American countries, London and New York being the two centers of these monies. But China regulates capital, so these things are not allowed in. The Chinese model may yet look even more attractive than it does now.

In describing this Chinese rise and how I believe it has the potential of being a threat to freedom in an extraordinary way that we haven’t seen since the end of WWI, I am not trying to suggest that Chinese don’t care about freedom; people do not need a Greek-Roman Christian heritage to care about freedom. That kind of claim is parochially and culturally very narrow. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its beautiful preamble, is a Mencian document (Mencius is one of Confucius’ disciples). The word “individual” never appears in the document. The language was shaped by the philosophy of Mencius because one of the crafters of the Universal Declaration was a Chinese gentleman named P.C. Chang. Of course this is December 1948, the day after the Genocide convention was passed. The communists didn’t come to power for another year.

There is no trouble in understanding freedom and human rights in any culture in the world. People living in tyrannies may in fact have a better understanding of what freedom is about than American teens, who think it’s just that you get your driver’s license in your late teens. The Chinese regime has fostered a nationalism to trump democracy. People are taught that they are threatened by democracy, that democracy would make people weak.

Party propaganda has it,

“How did Rwanda occur? Because they tried to build a democracy. If the Hutus had simply imposed their will, they never would have had that problem. If it moves in a democratic direction, China is going to fall apart; it will be like what happened to Russia, to Yugoslavia. Do you want to end up like Chechnya and Bosnia? That’s what the Americans really want. You are fortunate to be a Chinese living in an ethical, authoritarian system.”

The TV will show pictures of say the Los Angeles riots, the Sudan, and people are made frightened and confused. They’re proud to be Chinese and want to raise ethical kids. They want a country they can be proud of, certainly not like American kids.

Beijing Film Academy Animation School Dean Sun Lijun introduces China Propaganda Chief Li Changchun to Magic Dumpling President Kevin Geiger.

The Chinese are taught that American youth are smoking at an early age, use pot, have babies in their teens, watch pornography on TV, spread AIDS, get divorced, and don’t care what happens to their elderly parents. Why would you want to live in such an immoral way? This propaganda seems to work with many Chinese.

So what is growing in China is an authoritarian, patriotic, racially defined, Confucian Chinese project which is going to be a formidable challenge not just to the United States but, I think, to democracy, freedom, and human rights all around the world. China is going to seem quite attractive to many people. That is why it is so very important to understand what living without freedom really means.

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[Note: Apart from customized formatting, the strikethroughed parts within the braces "[ ]" are also OUR ANNEXATIONS they were not Included in the original copy.]

Additional Information:

After the start of the Korean conflict, the United States and also its democratic trends officially became China's main foreign adversary. The war provided numerous opportunities to show Americans in an extremely unfavorable light.

► The events of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 (where roughly over 400 or a far bigger number of Chinese civilians were brutally slaughtered for their dissent) were an indication to many elders in the CCP that liberalization in the propaganda sector had gone too far, and that the Party must rigorously compensate for that lose.

Since then Scope China's propaganda system (xuanchuan xitong) has been a sprawling bureaucratic establishment, extending into virtually every medium.

CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY USES Online spin doctors: China is known for using internet "spin doctors", specially trained internet users who comment on blogs, public forums or wikis, to shift the debate in favor of the Communist Party and influence public opinion.

The Chinese COMMUNIST state refers to all media work abroad as 'wai xuan', or "external propaganda." While the reality is that THEY ARE PROPAGANDISTS.

Dreadful Propaganda in the arts:

As in the Soviet Union, the CCP under Mao Zedong took socialist realism as its basis for art, making clear its goal was the 'education' of the people in communist ideology. This included, as during the Cultural Revolution, transforming literature and art to serve these ends. Pre-revolutionary song and operas were banned as a poisonous legacy of the past. Middle and high schools were targeted by one campaign because the students circulated romance and love stories among themselves.

Propaganda Poster with a helmet of a US soldier. Imperialism and all reactionaries are all paper tigers, 1965

All peoples of the world unite, to overthrow American imperialism! To overthrow Soviet revisionism! To overthrow the reactionaries of all nations! 1969

(and one its way to establish CHINESE TYRANNY AND OPPRESSION against everybody)

Famous propaganda works

Novel

"Red Crag" (红岩), a famous 1961 Chinese novel featuring underground communist agents fighting an espionage battle against the Kuomintang.

Sculpture

Rent Collection Courtyard (收租院), a 1965 sculpture depicting former landlord Liu Wencai as an evil landlord collecting rent from poor, although this depiction has been disputed by modern accounts.

Films and Plays

• Battle on Shangganling Mountain, a 1956 Chinese war film also known as Shangganling Battle (Chinese:上甘岭战役), depicting the Battle of Triangle Hill during the Korean War.
• The Eight model plays (八个样板戏), revolutionary themed operas and ballets, were the only ones allowed to be performed during the Cultural Revolution.^[49]
  • Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (智取威虎山), a play about communist soldiers infiltrating a bandit camp during the Chinese Civil War.
  • The Legend of the Red Lantern (红灯记), a play based on the activities of the communist resistance against Japan in Hulin during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
  • Red Detachment of Women (红色娘子军), a pre-Cultural Revolution-era play, later extolled during the Cultural Revolution, about the women of Hainan Island who rose up in resistance on behalf of the CCP
  • The White Haired Girl (白毛女), a play exploring the miseries of China peasants in 1930's China.

Songs

• "Socialism is Good" (《社会主义好》), a modern rock adaptation of which was performed by Zhang Qu and featured on the 1990s album Red Rock.