Part 1: Introduction
\nPart 2: The Communist Framework
\nPart 3: The Implementation of the Communist Framework Through Force and Coercion<\/p>\n
As we mentioned, based on the principles of the Communist Manifesto, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (October Revolution) was launched, establishing a socialist state throughout the territories of the Russian Empire. In 1919, the Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin founded the Communist International as a tool to promote communism in other countries, including China. In 1922, the more distant republics were annexed, forming the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), whose first leader was Lenin himself.<\/p>\n
The Soviet constitution, adopted in the 1930s and amended in the 1970s, stipulated that regions and nationalities would be represented in a kind of parliament known as the Supreme Soviet. However, in practice, all decisions, including the election of the USSR’s leader, were in the hands of the Communist Party (CPSU) and, more specifically, a small group of leaders, the Politburo. In China [1], the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) not only helped incorporate the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a branch of the Communist International, but also guided its growth and provided military support during the Japanese occupation in World War II and, later, during the civil war that led to the CCP’s rise to power and the creation of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949. Like the Soviet Union, the CCP promoted the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, along with those of Mao Zedong.<\/p>\n
When Lenin died in 1924 and Joseph Stalin took the reins of the Party and the Government, a series of large-scale repressive acts unfolded, bearing striking parallels in timing and form to those carried out during Mao’s era. So similar, in fact, that they seem to have been the work of the same person. Four years after Stalin initiated the collectivization of agriculture through mass expropriations, a severe drought lasting several years exacerbated the effects of reduced grain production, leading to a brutal famine across the Soviet Union. An estimated 6-8 million people died, with a particularly devastating impact on Ukraine, in what became known as the Holodomor (“starvation” in Ukrainian).<\/p>\n
In China, Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” which combined collectivization and mass labor with unrealistic industrial production targets, coincided once again with several droughts, causing the worst famine in China’s recent history, with an estimated 45 million people dying of starvation. In both the Soviet and Chinese cases, these events occurred eight to nine years after Mao and Stalin came to power, and between 35 and 37 years after the founding of the Communist Parties in their respective countries. In a similar period, 14 years after Stalin came to power and 17 years after Mao, the “Great Purge” and the “Cultural Revolution,” respectively, turned inward, targeting the Party and opponents of the regime. This brutal internal purge resulted in 1.3 million imprisonments and 700,000 executions in the USSR, while in the People’s Republic of China, estimates range from 7 million to, according to some sources, up to 20 million unnatural deaths.<\/p>\n
In the Soviet case, of the six members of Lenin’s Politburo, four were executed. Of the 1,966 delegates to the 17th Congress of the Communist Party, held in 1934, 1,108 were arrested, and almost all of them died, either executed or in prison. In China, beginning with the Red August massacre in Beijing, several massacres took place, such as the Guangxi massacre (with episodes of mass cannibalism), the Inner Mongolia incident, the Guangdong massacre, the Zhao Jianmin case, the Daoxian massacre, and the Shadian incident. In these events, millions of people suffered public humiliation, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, forced labor, sustained harassment, confiscation of property, and even executions. Furthermore, the repression extended not only to individuals but to entire categories of the population based on ethnicity, social class, or religion.<\/p>\n
In the USSR, population transfers to complete the ethnic cleansing of territories took people to remote, sparsely populated areas. At least nine distinct ethno-linguistic groups, including Germans, Greeks, Poles, Crimean Tatars, Balkars, Chechens, and Kalmyks, were deported to remote, unpopulated areas of Siberia and Kazakhstan. These transfers resulted in millions of deaths due to the harsh conditions. State antisemitism in Stalin’s final years, after World War II, also fueled the “Night of the Murdered Poets” (1952), in which thirteen of the most prominent Yiddish writers, poets, artists, musicians, and actors were secretly executed in a Moscow prison basement, and the “Doctors’ Plot,” in which eleven doctors (seven of them Jewish) were accused of attempting to assassinate prominent members of the CPSU.<\/p>\n
In the Chinese case, the forced relocation from cities to rural areas during the “Sending to the Countryside” movement at the height of the Cultural Revolution was combined with the destruction of relics and historical artifacts, and the looting of cultural and religious sites. In China,[4] there are 56 ethnic groups, of which the Han are the majority, representing 93.9% of the total population (year 2000), while the other 55 ethnic groups comprise only 6.1%. This disproportion should present few difficulties for their integration were it not for three issues: 1) they have cultural and religious traditions very different from Chinese culture; 2) these distinct minorities experienced cultural conflict with the CCP’s nation-building project; and 3) they live in vast territories that were not part of China’s historical heartland. During this period, the forced occupation of Tibet received the most media attention, but repression extended to other ethnic groups (e.g., Uyghurs in Xinjiang) and to all religions and spiritual practices.<\/p>\n
As we mentioned, the similarities between the Soviet and Chinese communist periods are striking, even though they lasted for a similar amount of time (29 years under Stalin and 27 years under Mao). All the actions of this period served to impose the communist framework on the entire population, effectively creating a mental prison. As a force for violent opposition, if at any point there was no clear enemy, one was deliberately created, including members of the CPSU and the CCP themselves, to keep the entire population within the framework. Without confrontation, especially during the consolidation phase, the framework weakens. The necessary mind-control mechanism for creating this framework\/prison also employed art and culture to sculpt the new Soviet man, and media control through targeted propaganda to keep citizens aligned with the Party’s messages.<\/p>\n
Also, during this period, several of the inconsistencies of communist ideology that we outlined in the previous article became clearly evident. The Party seizes power \u201cin the name of the proletariat\u201d to protect its interests, but who decides what the proletariat needs? Does the proletariat have its own voice to be heard? And also, who decides what the Party wants?<\/p>\n
In reality, it is highly improbable that a Party will oversee and guarantee the transition to its complete disappearance, to that stateless and classless society that Marx and Engels spoke of in the Manifesto, while maintaining absolute power over the population, means of production, media, justice, etc., during this transitional process. This is further compounded by the declared and explicit rejection of traditional values \u200b\u200bsuch as truth and justice, which Marx so clearly expressed on numerous occasions. Without strong moral values \u200b\u200bsuch as justice and respect for individual liberties, there is no incentive for a Party with absolute power to relinquish it.<\/p>\n
As we will see in the next installment, the apparent identification between Stalin or Mao and the will of the Party was only instrumental, and the Party will continue to exercise power to guarantee its survival regardless of the specific leader in power at any given time and any other consideration, inevitably leading, with the passage of time and the strict application of these principles, to the collapse of the Soviet regime.<\/p>\n
References:
\n[1] https:\/\/en.minghui.org\/html\/articles\/2020\/11\/21\/118154.html
\n[2] Robert Service.Stalin: A Biography.2004. ISBN 978-0-330-41913-0 Mr. David Holloway (1996).Stalin and the Bomb.Yale University Press. p.18. ISBN 978-0300066647;
\nA Companion to Russian History. Abbott Gleason (2009). Wiley-Blackwell. p.373. ISBN 978\u20131\u20134051\u20133560\u20133;
\nGeoffrey A. Hosking (2001). “Russia and the Russians: a history” Harvard University Press. p.469. ISBN 978\u20130\u2013674\u201300473\u20136
\nGetty, Rittersporn, Zemskov (1993).Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence (in English). Vol. 98, No. 4. The American Historical Review. pp. 100-11017-1
\n[3] Akbar, Arifa (September 17, 2010).”Mao’s Great Leap Forward killed 45 million in four years.The Independent (in English).
\nBusky, Donald F. (2002). Communism in History and Theory (in English). Greenwood Publishing Group., p. 11.
\n\u00abThe Chinese Cultural Revolution\u00bb. Art History.jcyl.en.
\n\u201cThe Secret Life of Mao Tse-Tung: The Communist Leader of the 40 Million Dead and the Thousand Lovers\u201d. abc. September 30,
\nPye , Lucian W. ( 1986 ). \u00abReassessing the Cultural Revolution\u00bb. The China Quarterly (108): 597-612. ISSN 0305-7410.
\n\u00abRemembering the Dark Days of China’s Cultural Revolution\u00bb. South China Morning Post (English). August 18,
\nStrauss, Valerie; Southerl, Daniel (July 17, 1994). \u201cHOW MANY DIED? NEW EVIDENCE SUGGESTS FAR HIGH NUMBERS FOR THE VICTIMS OF MAO ZEDONG’S ERA\u00bb. Washington Post (in American English). ISSN 0190-8286.
\nFoundation, World Peace. \u00abChina: the Cultural Revolution | Mass Atrocity Endings\u201d (in American English).
\n\u00abA Brief Overview of China’s Cultural Revolution\u00bb. The Encyclopedia of Britannica.
\n\u00abSource List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Primary Megadeaths of the Twentieth Century\u00bb. Necrometrics.
\n\u00abChronology of Mass Killings during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) | Science Po Mass Violence and Resistance – Research Network\u00bb. www.sciencespo.fr (in English).
\nSutton , Donald S. ( 1995 ). \u00abConsuming Counterrevolution: The Ritual and Culture of Cannibalism in Wuxuan, Guangxi, China, May to July 1968\u00bb. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1): 136-172. ISSN 0010-4175.
\n\u00abInterview: ‘People Were Eaten by the Revolutionary Masses’\u00bb. Radio Free Asia (in English).
\nKristof, Nicholas D. (January 6, 1993). “A Tale of Red Guards and Cannibals. The New York Times (in American English). ISSN 0362-4331.
\n[4] Eugenio Anguiano-China, its ethnic minorities and the Uighur and Tibetan resistances<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Fall of Communism in China: Lessons from the Collapse of the USSR Part 1: Introduction Part 2: The Communist Framework Part 3: The Implementation of the Communist Framework Through Force and Coercion As we mentioned, based on the principles of the Communist Manifesto, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (October Revolution) was launched, establishing a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16752,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[767],"tags":[311,1098,1100,112],"class_list":["post-18151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-100-years-of-ccp","tag-100-anos-de-comunismo","tag-100-years-of-communism","tag-ccp","tag-pcch"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinawatchinstitute.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinawatchinstitute.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinawatchinstitute.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinawatchinstitute.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinawatchinstitute.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18151"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinawatchinstitute.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18153,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinawatchinstitute.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18151\/revisions\/18153"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinawatchinstitute.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinawatchinstitute.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinawatchinstitute.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinawatchinstitute.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}