(Minghui.org) China has been the world’s second-largest economy for a decade. Some people credit the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for making it happen. As analyzed below, the growing clout of China came at the expense of Western countries, including the U.S., as well as China’s own people.
Wishful Thinking That Went Astray
The CCP had been implementing a planned economy in its early years ruling China. This suppressed China’s potential and isolated China’s economy from the rest of the world. The situation changed in the 1970s when Western countries, especially the United States, began to help China.
It started during the cold war when the U.S.-led capitalist countries faced the military mighty power of the Soviet Union-led communism bloc. At that time, Beijing, though in the communist camp, broke away from the Soviet Union. U.S. academics came up with an idea to pull China into the capitalist side to isolate the Soviet Union.
The U.S. plan was called the “Peaceful Revolution”: to do business with China and gradually absorb it into the world's capitalist economic system; this would eventually transform China into capitalism economically, and in the meantime push it into a democratic free country politically.
The U.S. President Nixon visited Beijing in 1972. At that time, the CCP’s Cultural Revolution (1966 - 1976) had almost brought China’s economy to the brink of collapse. The U.S.’ peaceful revolution came at the right time to save the CCP. The CCP then announced the start of its economic reform in 1978.
The U.S. provided China with many free technologies and poured in hundreds of billions of dollars. It opened the market of the U.S. and the Western world to China. It also helped Beijing join the World Trade Organization (WTO) even after the Soviet Union collapsed and the CCP launched the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
However, there was a loophole in this plan of “Peaceful Revolution” concept: If Beijing wanted to become a qualified player in the capitalist economic system, it must abandon its communist ideology and more importantly, give up its privilege to enslave the over one billion Chinese people.
The CCP would not accept it. So it played its old trick – cheating. It promised changes, which were to happen at a later time, but most of which never happened. In the meantime, the CCP raked in the benefits from collaborating with the West right away.
The CCP adopted the capitalist economy as it had no other way to survive. But in its propaganda, it told the Chinese people that this market economy is the primary stage of socialism, or the “Socialist Market Economy with Chinese characteristics.”
Once the CCP loosened its reign on the economy, the Chinese people worked diligently to create an economic boom, with their heritage of traditional Chinese values: hardworking, wisdom, and saving.
Therefore, China’s economic achievement was due to the U.S.’ offering the opportunity and support, as well as Chinese people working hard to create wealth. In the meantime, the wishful thinking of Western countries driving China’s political reform through economic development did not happen. Instead of joining the free world ideologically, Beijing gradually grew to gain more resources to suppress people domestically and push its communist agenda globally.
In the Name of Communism: The Birth of a New Elite Class
From Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto to the Soviet Union and communist China, the communist propaganda has always been serving the poor to achieve egalitarianism. Almost without exception, however, this sugar-coated lie ended up with brutality, totalitarianism, and an elite group that suppresses people politically while amassing fortune economically.
Where did the money go in China? A few numbers from different researchers may offer a glimpse: China Merchants Bank reported in 2019 that 2% of the people in China controls 80% of the wealth, and Beijing University reported that China’s Gini Coefficient was 0.73 in 2014 (a country is considered as having big income gaps if the number is greater than 0.4 and severe income gap if greater than 0.5).
The CCP officials use the power they have to grab wealth from the Chinese people. The benefit of China’s economy opening up was snatched away by the top 500 officials and their families. They transferred the amounts of money outside of China, including to Hong Kong, the U.S., and Switzerland. It was reported in 2020 that 100 Chinese have deposited over 7.8 trillion yuan (US $1.2 trillion) in the Swiss Bank UBS alone.
Those officials’ spouses and children reside outside of China. According to the U.S. government statistics, for CCP officials with ministerial rank or higher, including those retired, 74.5% of their children have American green card or citizenship and 91% of their grandchildren do.
The government spending also showed this economic benefit distribution. The government spending in the U.S. is 3.4% of its national GDP, 2.8% in Japan, but 25.6% in China.
The average personal income in the U.S. is 11 times that in China, while the housing price in China is 5 times that in the U.S. China’s Premier Li Keqiang said in 2020 that there were 600 million Chinese whose monthly income was less than 1,000 yuan (US $153).
The CCP deprives people of their freedoms of religion, speech, publication, and others. This then enables it to deprive people of economic wealth.
Expensive Education, Residency, and Healthcare
China’s government spending on education is far below a normal country. The free education in democratic countries is more affordable: people do not pay for tuition, textbooks, or other fees. The governments even provide lunches to poor families.
In contrast, China's nine-year free education is accompanied by hefty fees charged in various categories. Still, the government claims it does not have money to build enough schools, and does not allow the 60 million children of migrant workers (farmers who go to the city to work) to attend schools in cities where their parents work
The CCP ties people to the locale where they were born via the Residency Card system. Though the government wants migrant workers to go to cities to work, they only want the labor force, but nothing else. Those migrant workers do not have city residency status and cannot enjoy the same benefits as the city dwellers, including rights to buy apartments, contribute to the pension system, and purchase health insurance through their employers.
Their children cannot attend city schools, either. Those children have to stay at their home villages, separated from their parents. There’s a story of a girl who skipped breakfast for four years only to save money to buy a train ticket so that she could go to see her mother in the city.
Medical expense is another money draining hole in China. A severe illness can make a middle class family lose everything and get into deep debt, not to mention people who live paycheck to paycheck and farmers.
On the other hand, Chinese officials have moved over 100 trillion yuan (US $15.1 trillion) outside of China as their own assets. That amount alone could pay for the entire nation’s free healthcare insurance for 625 years!
In fact, looking at government healthcare spending, 80 percent was for the treatment and convalescence of high-ranking officials – only 20 percent was left for the general public. The CCP even kills healthy people to get their organs for these senior cadres or their family members. Jiang Mianheng, former CCP head Jiang Zemin’s son, had three kidney transplants and killed five people to make that happen.
A Threat to All of Us
Many Chinese people may feel that if they just live a normal life and do not break any law, they will be fine and have a good enough life. However, in a country where human rights are ignored or even trampled on, that dream may only be a dream – anyone could be snatched by the CCP if it wants.
Even the live organ harvesting might come to you. The CCP has invented a unique technology called “brain stem injury impact machine.” Its function is to tie a person to this machine and make the person brain-dead instantly. In the meantime, the person’s blood is still circulating, keeping his organs live and fresh, so that the CCP can take them out for transplant profit.
The China Tribunal, an independent people's tribunal in London established to inquire into forced organ harvesting, made the verdict on June 17, 2019, that the CCP had committed crimes against humanity, genocide, and murder, for its live organ harvesting practice.
The current main victims of the CCP’s live organ harvesting are Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, and other minority groups. But any Chinese can be subject to it. China’s third-generation identification card has collected the DNA of the cardholder, which means the CCP can make anyone a victim.
In October 2020, China’s former Health Minister Huang Jiefu said that China will be the number one organ transplant country. Where did those organs come from? Traditional Chinese culture believes in burying the whole body and few Chinese would like to donate their organs or bodies.
Even the people around the world are not immune from the CCP’s threat. The CCP has polluted China’s environment so badly that it is systematically destroying it and the impact is spreading to the world; the CCP has produced poisonous products and sold them all over the world; the CCP has hid and lied about the COVID-19 infections in China and spread the virus to the world, causing 2.7 million deaths globally so far; and the CCP has destroyed the value system of humanity and ruined people’s spiritual connection to the divine.
The Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek argued in his famous book “The Road to Serfdom,” that communism will for sure oppress human rights and eventually, individuals have nothing left but becoming slaves.
In fact, communism’s ultimate agenda is to destroy humanity.
All content published on this website is copyrighted by Minghui.org. Minghui will produce compilations of its online content regularly and on special occasions.
Category: News Commentary
