(Minghui.org) During the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, many people and countries outside of China have witnessed how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has lied about the initial outbreak and the under-reported numbers of infected cases and deaths.
What many in the West may not know is that many Chinese people have believed the lies perpetuated by the CCP, and thought that the U.S. and/or other countries are to blame for the pandemic and that China is the savior of the world in its fight against the virus.
Below is a list of topics discussed on social media platforms in China:
Is coronavirus a plot from the United States?Is Fang Fang (a writer in Wuhan who has chronicled the dire situation of the lockdown in her diaries posted online) a good person or a traitor?Should Chinese students studying in other countries return to China for their own safety?Are the United States and Europe doomed to fail pretty soon?Should China help the United States?Is it true that China will dominate the world in the very near future?Should the Chinese government also hand out stimulus checks to struggling citizens like Western countries?Is the coronavirus data reported by the Chinese government reliable?Should we take this chance and occupy Taiwan by force?
Although surprising to Westerners, these questions illustrate what is on the minds of Chinese people, who have become accustomed to thinking this way because of the CCP's long-term brainwashing of its people with propaganda filled with lies.
When Crop Production Was “Boosted” 150 Times
According to David Satter, American journalist and author, the Great Leap Forward of China in the late 1950s alone took the lives of 45 million people. Altogether, about 100 million died due to communism, making it “the greatest catastrophe in human history,” he wrote in a 2017 Wall Street Journal article titled “100 Years of Communism–and 100 Million Dead.”
In hindsight, the CCP-inflicted deaths did not occur in one day; rather, they took place over time as the CCP fabricated one lie after another and kept covering up its own citizens' sufferings, similar to what has been unfolding in the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
The average production was about 400 kg per mu (or 2.4 tons per acre) for wheat and rice, the staple foods of China, in 2010-2011. In June 1958, however, one town in Henan Province reported production of 1,000 kg of rice per mu; as other places followed suit, the crop production number kept increasing. At one point, Xushui County in Hebei Province claimed to have a production of 60,000 kg of wheat per mu (or 360 tons per acre).
When then communist leader Mao Zedong visited Xushui on August 4, 1958, and heard about this, he was very pleased. After a while, he began to worry, “What should we do with so much grain?”
After more than the normal amount of grain was turned into the government—due to the “inflated” production, there was very little left. Mao also exported 6.8 billion kilograms of grain at the time—that alone was enough to feed 34 million people for one year, even though the Chinese people were starving to death.
The CCP claimed that the famine occurred because of “natural disasters.” Very few people went to verify the climate in those few years (1959-1961), which turned out to be quite normal; but many forgot about it soon afterward, and the CCP was once again depicted as a hero “fighting for” its people in those “difficult” times.
The famine was one of the many examples of the Chinese people being harmed by the CCP. Besides high output in the land, other goals set during the Great Leap Forward included “every village setting up steel plants,” in order to produce more steel than the United Kingdom in 10 years and the United States in 15 years.
The CCP “Lying” Machine Is Still Running
When Chinese people are reminded of the above-mentioned tragedies, they often consider it a joke and dismiss it as ancient history. Without thinking about the underlying root cause, however, they may not realize the machine that has cranked up so many tragedies in the past, communism, is still running at full speed. The only difference, though, is that the well-oiled machine is now more powerful than ever, which means it is more harmful.
Peng Dehuai, one of the best known Chinese generals and Defense Minister (1953-1959), was labeled in 1959 as a leader of an “anti-Party clique” for criticizing the Great Leap Forward movement and stripped of all his positions. He later lived in obscurity and died in prison in 1974.
Decades have passed and the suppression of the truth is still going on in China. Yuan Longping, Chinese agronomist known as the “Father of Hybrid Rice” by Chinese media, claimed on the state-owned China Central Television on July 8, 2019, that China would be in big trouble if other nations stopped exporting rice to China. Recently on April 9, 2020, People's Daily cited Yuan as saying that China’s rice production is fully self-sufficient and no shortage is expected. Such conflicting statements make people wonder whether Yuan was under pressure to retract his earlier statement.
While some people like Yuan were forced to tell lies, many more have grown used to telling lies as a way of life in China. Luckin Coffee is the biggest competitor of Starbucks in China. The news media recently reported that the company’s CEO and some top leaders had fabricated transactions of 2.2 billion yuan in order to prop up its revenue. That led to the halt of Luckin Coffee’s trading (listed as LK on the Nasdaq).
Lying is a key component of communism. Leonid Brezhnev, the general secretary of the Central Committee of the governing Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) between 1964 and 1982, said to his brother, “What communism? It is all empty talk to seduce people.”
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better,” reflected Theodore Dalrymple, editor and a senior official of the Manhattan Institute, “When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity.”
Path Forward
When the lies are contained in China, people in other countries do not feel the impact. However, once the CCP's lies cross national borders, many other countries and their citizens have also become victims. As of April 13, 2020, the coronavirus has caused nearly two million infections worldwide, with about 120,000 deaths.
“Coronavirus crisis proves communism is still a grave threat to the entire world. If Beijing had just been honest, the pandemic could have been preventable, ” wrote Marion Smith, executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, on April 5 in a USA Today article titled “Blame the Chinese Communist Party for the coronavirus crisis”.
A system that generates lies also produces fake products. Dutch authorities recently received 1.3 million face masks from China for distribution to healthcare providers. The masks came with labels of N95 certification, but they failed to meet quality standards. After a second test failed, about 600,000 masks were recalled.
Similarly, Spain announced on March 26 that the rapid testing kits purchased from a Chinese company only had a 30% coronavirus detection rate. As a result, 640,000 kits would be returned.
The biggest harm of the CCP’s lies could be its erosion of moral values and disregard for human life, both domestically and overseas.
As the CCP is growing its clout on the international stage, it is time for people to pause and think about how not to be misled by the CCP's lies and how to uphold our principles.
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Category: News Commentary
