I apply the word “dissident” to China as it was applied in post-Stalin Russia to a Russian who publicly contradicted the Soviet propaganda and hence could be imprisoned, while under Stalin he could be killed or tortured to death.
Publications in Russian, forbidden in Russia, go back to the times of absolutism and serfdom in Russia.
The Epoch Times began to be published (outside China) in 2000; its English edition appeared in 2004 and has been distributed free of charge, but I have never seen or heard it quoted by the U.S. media, and I learned about its existence because its translator asked me for the permission to translate my columns into Chinese for the edition of the newspaper in Chinese.
My Yahoo! offers 7,970,000 items for “The Epoch Times.” The first page of this list of items cites “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party,” which the newspaper published in 2004.
How many Chinese in China do share the views expressed in the “Commentaries”? That cannot be known, but what is significant is that these views have appeared in a native Chinese mind (Zheng Peichun, a Chinese dissident who was sentenced for his dissidence to seven years of imprisonment).
The first of the nine commentaries says: “The demise of the Chinese Communist Party is only a matter of time.”
Such statements encourage the dissidence. But they also frighten the dictatorship and make it more anxious to achieve “world domination.”
The second Commentary explains that the “Chinese Communist Party” has no legitimacy. It “has set itself above all, conquering all in its path, thereby bringing an endless catastrophe in China.”
According to the third Commentary, the essence of the CCP is “struggle against both China and other nations.”
According to the fourth Commentary, “the Communist Party is an anti-universe force.”
Commentary five is about “the collusion of Jiang Zemin [the predecessor of Hu Jintao] with the CCP to persecute Falun Gong.”
Commentary six is devoted to how the CCP has destroyed “a rich traditional Chinese culture.”
The CCP’s “history of killing” is the subject of the seventh Commentary — up to 80 million innocent Chinese have been killed under the rule of the CCP.
Commentary eight explains that what is called Marxism is “an evil cult that harms mankind.”
The ninth (final) Commentary states that “it is especially important for us to understand why the CCP acts criminally and to expose its criminal nature.”
We may recall in this connection the Tiananmen uprising and the fact that about 100,000 “riots” annually occur in China today. As “The Nine Commentaries” indicate, such events have profound mental roots in the free West, known in China owing to the world media, such as the Internet.
Type the words “Epoch Times” on a computer in New York, and you will have the publication on the screen, and the printing of “The Nine Commentaries” will take seconds. We have heard much on the Chinese dictators’ electronic search for the “wrong” Internet images, but it is difficult to imagine that the search is 100 percent effective even though American corporations have been said to help the dictatorship of China in this respect in exchange for their trade privileges.
And here The Epoch Times publishes in England, in the United States, and other English-speaking countries and in many other countries in many other languages. The only way out for the dictatorship of China is to give up their dictatorship or to annihilate the free West as an involuntary source of pro-Western sedition in China of which “The Nine Commentaries” are a fair example.
The dictators of China cannot annihilate The Epoch Times published in New York. Nor has it been able to expurgate “The Nine Commentaries” in this newspaper. Just as the replica of the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square during the uprising, “The Nine Commentaries” show how the Chinese mind is linked mentally with the free West.
The fact is that it is impossible in the 21st century to isolate China and the free West as it was possible before the advent of the Internet. The Soviet dictators began after World War II to jam the Western broadcasts in Russian. That diminished the Russian knowledge of the outside world. But it should be born in mind that a curtailed knowledge of the outside world may produce a mythological perception of it: thus, owing to the Soviet radio jamming many Russians mythologized the free West into a paradise, which was one of the causes of the fall of the Soviet dictatorship in 1991.
Historically speaking, there have never coexisted two worlds — free and un-free — which could communicate as by today’s means of global communication. The un-free world cannot exist without annihilating or subjugating the free world, the source of subversion by the fact of its very existence and without any intention to subvert. The very existence of the free world produces a powerful flow of subversion, which cannot be sealed off hermetically, given the global communication of today.
You can e-mail me at navlev@cloud9.net.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.