(Minghui.org) “Most of them just listened quietly—after all, they all work in China’s system and the phone calls are monitored,” said Xiao Xia. “But after I finished talking, they always thanked me again and again. This has happened a lot lately.”
Xiao is a volunteer at the Quitting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Service Center in Los Angeles. She said that she has noticed big changes in recent months when calling people in China to inform them of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) persecution of law-abiding people such as Falun Gong practitioners. In the early years of her volunteer work, the recipients often hung up on her or used foul language.
As the world became more alarmed of the CCP's brutality and lies, especially through the coronavirus cover-up, more and more CCP officials, who know the inner workings of the Party, have also sensed looming crises brewing in China and begun to evaluate their options for securing their safety. Many of them have chosen to quit the CCP and its affiliated organizations so as to avoid being held responsible when the time comes to seek justice against the CCP for its harm to China and the rest of the world.
East German Trials
What is unfolding in China today was preceded by similar phenomena that had occurred elsewhere in history. One example was East Germany.
It was December 4, 1989, four weeks after the Berlin Wall was demolished. Arnold Vaatz, a physicist who worked in Erfurt where East Germany secret police (Stasi) kept records, found smoke coming out from Stasi’s district headquarters. He and other local citizens quickly went there and sealed the documents including computers to preserve records.
It was through these and other rescued files that people learned how Stasi functioned as the communist party’s secret police and intelligence agency. With 270,000 employees including 180,000 informers, it spied on nearly every aspect of East Germans’ daily lives and was responsible for international espionage.
Through television signals and word-of-mouth, East German residents learned about the Western world and about 2.7 million crossed the border in Berlin to West Germany, for both freedom and a better quality of life.
The Berlin Wall was built in 1961 under the order of communist party chairman Walter Ulbricht. The East German government also issued shooting orders to border guards against defectors. “Do not hesitate to use your firearm, not even when the border is breached in the company of women and children, which is a tactic the traitors have often used,” wrote an order in October 1973.
All these later became evidence to hold communist party leaders accountable. Egon Krenz, the last East German communist leader, was convicted in August 1997 of manslaughter. “At least 916 people were killed trying to escape during East Germany’s 41 years of existence, according to authorities, including 80 at the Berlin Wall,” said an Associated Press news on August 25, 1997, titled “East Germany’s last communist leader convicted in border shootings.”
Altogether, 160 people were charged related to these deaths. “I think the wall trials should continue, so the families who suffered can continue to publicize the injustices,” said 56-year-old Klaus-Peter Eich, who was shot in the back trying to escape from East Berlin in 1961, which paralyzed his lower body.
Beneath the Peace on the Surface
Now let us take a look at modern China. Although the CCP ruling appears intact on the surface, many signs have pointed to looming crises.
All public servants, from high-ranking officials to village heads, must submit their passports to their supervising agencies for safekeeping when they are not traveling outside of China. When officials do need to visit other countries, they usually travel in groups that employ a mutual supervision system whereby everyone is asked to keep an eye on everyone else so that no individual can flee or defect without being noticed.
Wang Liqiang, a former special agent, defected to Australia on November 22, 2019. He was the first CCP spy since the CCP took power in 1949 who had revealed his identity to the outside. Heng He, an expert on China issues, considered this very meaningful since Wang worked at the hub of the CCP intelligence network in Hong Kong, and his former supervisor was one of the key CCP intelligence officers in Hong Kong.
The information provided by Wang detailed how the CCP controlled Hong Kong, as well as social media and public opinions in Taiwan. The CCP’s infiltration was comprehensive and deep. Wang’s statements tore apart the iron curtain of the CCP’s massive disinformation network. Wang said he chose to speak out because he had witnessed how badly the CCP treated Hong Kong during the Hong Kong anti-extradition bill in June 2019. He didn't want similar things to happen to Taiwan.
Netizen 4EverHongKong gave an example of Hong Kong's suffering: the unusually high number of “suicide deaths” of young people in Hong Kong during the anti-extradition bill movement. This netizen wrote, “38 students committed suicide in 2015, 32 in 2016, and 25 in 2017, but the number suddenly soared to thousands in 2019.” He continued, “Many of the thousands of 'suicide deaths” were young people clad in black with their hands tied. Some of the bodies were floating in the water, some were deserted in the woods, while others fell from high buildings.” Many of the deceased were known to have participated in the anti-extradition bill movement. Their families suspected that they had been killed by police, much like those students in the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre.
Hong Kong people were not the only ones suffering at the hands of the CCP. Another CCP official provided over 400 pages of documents to the New York Times on November 16, 2019, detailing how the CCP conducted mass arrests and detention of Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, in the name of education and training. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) also exposed the CCP’s documents on November 24, 2019. The documents detailed how the CCP had built concentration camps in Xinjiang that could hold one million Uyghurs.
An Era of Awakening
China’s National Health Commission (NHC) was aware of the coronavirus outbreak as early as December 30, 2019, several days after the first infection case was confirmed. But like other government agencies, the NHC and its branches at the provincial and city-level all blocked the information, while punishing whistleblowers.
As of late October 2020, the pandemic has caused more than 46 million infections worldwide and over 1.2 million deaths. The loss of human lives has drawn intense reactions from the international community.
Arthur Waldron, China historian and professor of international relations in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, said the CCP has started on a path of decline and is headed towards a similar fate as the Soviet Union when it collapsed in 1991.
A senior CCP official once talked with Waldron about the concern. “He said to me, Arthur, what the hell are we going to do? Everybody knows that this [political] system doesn’t work. We have reached a “si hu tong” (dead-end street),” explained Waldron during an interview late last year.
The official continued, “But what we don’t know is what is the next step to take because … there are mines everywhere, and if we take a step, we may set off a terrible explosion.”
Wang Qishan, vice-premier of China, already recognized this back in 2015 when he was secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. “The corruption in the Party is widespread and serious to the point that it will disintegrate,” he said in a standing committee meeting that year, “whether you acknowledge it or not, it is a fact.”
Ending of the Communism Nightmare
The current situation in China is even worse than when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. “The wall will still be standing in 50 or a hundred years if the reasons for its existence have not been removed,” Erich Honecker, then General Secretary of East Germany said optimistically in January 1989.
But the wall was nonetheless demolished late that year, followed by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc of communism, including the Soviet Union, in 1991.
The overwhelming pessimism of CCP officials has also been confirmed by overseas statistics. Pew Research Center released a report on October 6 showing that views of China had sharply worsened in major Western countries.
“Views of China have grown more negative in recent years across many advanced economies, and unfavorable opinion has soared over the past year... a majority in each of the surveyed countries has an unfavorable opinion of China,” wrote the report, “Negative views have reached their highest points since the Center began polling on this topic more than a decade ago.”
Negative views of China in Australia, for example, increased 24% since last year and has now reached 81%. Similarly, the percentage increased by 24% in the United Kingdom and has shot up to 74%.
“The rise in unfavorable views comes amid widespread criticism over how China handled the coronavirus pandemic. Across the 14 nations surveyed, a median of 61% say China did a poor job dealing with the outbreak,” explained the report.
Consistent with these public opinions, government officials have also taken action. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) updated its policy manual in October to step up efforts to bar Communist Party members from being granted entry or permanent residency.
“The inadmissibility grounds for immigrant membership in or affiliation with the Communist or any other totalitarian party is part of a broader set of laws passed by Congress to address threats to the safety and security of the United States,” explained Chapter 3 of the manual, “Its original purpose was to protect the United States against un-American and subversive activities that were considered threats to national security.”
After the CCP enforced national security law in Hong Kong on June 30, 2020, the U.S. Congress passed the Hong Kong Autonomy Act in July to “hold China accountable for its aggressive actions against the people of Hong Kong.” As required by the Act, the U.S. Department of State released a report on October 14 “identifying foreign persons who are materially contributing to, have materially contributed to, or attempt to materially contribute to the failure of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to meet its obligations under the Sino-British Joint Declaration or Hong Kong’s Basic Law.”
In the report, ten individuals were identified as responsible for harming Hong Kong's interest. According to a press release of the U.S. Department of State, per Section 5(a) of the Act, the Secretary of State has worked with the Secretary of the Treasury to impose asset-blocking sanctions on each of the foreign persons listed in this report.
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