The funniest thing to watch on television during the last two weeks has been the shock and disbelief in the faces and voices of the TV networks’ elite anchors about the rough turn of events in China. In measured, shocked tones, NBC’s Tom Brokaw said, “Nobody expected this to happen!”
“Nobody,” Tom? You should have said, nobody in the cloistered little group you associate with or call on for information. If that is, indeed, the case, then you should immediately investigate your network’s resource bank on which you base your expectations.
I can’t find anyone I know who did NOT expect the crackdown to happen. Out here in the hinterland, it was easy to predict that the mailed fist of Communism would smash into the faces of the students.
It looks like the electronic media actually expected that they could bring down a dictatorial government just like the televised pictures of mobs in the streets brought down the Ferdinand Marcos government in the Philippines. The media apparently didn’t recognize the fundamental difference: Marcos was a Westerner who wouldn’t order the army to shoot down unarmed civilians, while Communists have no such compunctions.
The historical fact is that the Chinese Communist regime is the most criminal and repressive in history. No other despot is even in the same class, not even Stalin at his worst.
In 1971, the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee published a landmark document called “The Human Cost of Communism in China.” It was compiled from reliable sources and written by a widely recognized authority on China and Asian affairs, Professor Richard Walker of the University of South Carolina.
Walker estimated that the number of deaths directly traceable to the Chinese Communist regime is between 34 and 64 million, the most extensive and horrendous record of killings of any government known to history. Deng Xiaoping is part of the same regime that took power in China in 1949 under Mao Tse-tung.
Here are some of Professor Walker’s calculations, which have been considered the authoritative figures ever since 1971. The political liquidation campaigns between 1949 and 1958 took a toll of between 15 and 30 million deaths, the Great Leap Forward and the Communes killed one to two million persons, and deaths in forced labor camps and “frontier development” totaled 15 to 25 million lives.
Many of the executions took place after mass public trials in which the assembled crowds, whipped up to a frenzy by planted agitators, called for death without mercy. Mao and his colleagues not only made no attempt to conceal this violence, but the official Communist press and radio broadcast the most gruesome and detailed accounts in order to amplify the mass terror.
The eminent British Sovietologist, Robert Conquest, estimated that the human cost of Communism in the Soviet Union was at least 21,500,000 persons executed or killed. So, whatever we think of Stalinist Russia, the Chinese are as evil or worse.
In line with the old adage “it takes one to know one,” the Soviets have provided some interesting reports on the inhumanity of Chinese Communism. Radio Moscow, on May 30, 1967, claimed that more than 18 million political prisoners were languishing in some 10,000 camps in mainland China, and that the prisoners were being “treated like animals.”
A United Nations report of 1955 state that 20 to 25 million persons were then held in regular Chinese Communist labor camps and another 12.5 million in “corrective” labor camps. All estimates are more than ten million for the number of Chinese in forced labor camps “for reform.”
In the months just before Richard Nixon’s 1972 journey to pay his respects to the Mao regime, Chinese troops were machine-gunning scores of their fellow Chinese who were trying to escape to Hong Kong.
The intellectual repression was just as ruthless. When Richard Nixon traveled to China in February 1972 and called for “normalization” of relations, American reporters discovered that entire bookstores were devoted exclusively – not just to Communist propaganda but – to the writings of just one man, Mao Tse-tung.
I remember that, during the TV coverage of that opening, a reporter asked a young couple, “What do you do when you go out on a date?” The woman dutifully replied, “We read the writings of Chairman Mao.”
The Deng Xiaoping regime has continued to demonstrate its inhumanity by its forced late-term abortions on unwilling mothers. Dictators who are so cruel to women could not be expected to be less so to students.
The diplomates and businessmen who once talked so effusively about “playing the China card” now find that a China card isn’t in the deck.
