Communism has killed over 100 million in peace

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An Overdue Memorial
June 13, 2007; Page A18

The numbers are almost beyond reckoning. Mao Zedong was responsible for 70 million peacetime murders, according to his biographer Jung Chang. The middle estimate of Stalin's victims is 40 million. Pol Pot slaughtered nearly three million fellow Cambodians in only four years. Ethiopia's Mengistu killed some 1.5 million opponents in the late 1970s, and contributed to the death by starvation of a million others in the 1980s.

Throughout these and other horrors, Communists always managed to find high-profile apologists among the bourgeois intellectuals: Jean-Paul Sartre for Stalin, Noam Chomsky for Pol Pot, and so on. Some, like Sidney Hook, Arthur Koestler and Whittaker Chambers, repented, but most did not. They may not have been witting accomplices to the butchery, quite. But they are the reason why the West was almost fatally late in recognizing the depth of evil it faced in its communist enemy.

Not by coincidence, yesterday's dedication took place on the 20th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's speech at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, calling on the Soviets to "tear down this wall." Back then, the smart set (and some of his own advisers) said he was a fool for seeking to bring the communist nightmare to an end. Inasmuch as he led the free world in doing so, the memorial is also, inescapably, a tribute to him.

Considering the enormity of what it commemorates, the Memorial to the Victims of Communism, dedicated by President Bush yesterday, is striking for its modest proportions: a 10-foot female figure raising a torch at a busy intersection in Washington, D.C. That's a fitting rebuke to an ideology that made a fetish of statuary, and murder, on a monumental scale.

The Chinese Government is Evil

The Chinese Government is evil and self centered. When was the last time you heard of the Chinese military taking part in a humanitarian mission? Certainly not during the 2005 Indonesian tsunami that killed hundred of thousands.

Did you know that Chinese culture encourages skinning dogs alive for food? They believe the suffering makes the meat taste better.

Did you know that the Chinese Government has hired Steven Spielberg to overhaul its image for the 2008 Olympics? I guess the 400,000 butchered Sudanese aren't an issue for Spielberg because they aren't Jews. The Chinese Government is Sudan's largest benefactor and supporter on the U.N. Security Council.

Everybody knows about Tibet but everyone seems to have forgotten all about it. What happened?

Did you know that people are still in prison to this day for protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989?

How a bunch of savages like the Chinese were able to convince the International Olympic Committee they are civilized enough to deserve the honor of hosting the 2008 games is beyond me. I'm guessing it had something to do with money.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117505109799351409.html COMMENTARY

The 'Genocide Olympics'

By RONAN FARROW and MIA FARROW
March 28, 2007; Page A17

"One World, One Dream" is China's slogan for its 2008 Olympics. But there is one nightmare that China shouldn't be allowed to sweep under the rug. That nightmare is Darfur, where more than 400,000 people have been killed and more than two-and-a-half million driven from flaming villages by the Chinese-backed government of Sudan.

That so many corporate sponsors want the world to look away from that atrocity during the games is bad enough. But equally disappointing is the decision of artists like director Steven Spielberg -- who quietly visited China this month as he prepares to help stage the Olympic ceremonies -- to sanitize Beijing's image. Is Mr. Spielberg, who in 1994 founded the Shoah Foundation to record the testimony of survivors of the holocaust, aware that China is bankrolling Darfur's genocide?

Partners in crime: Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir meets with Chinese President Hu Jintao, Feb. 3, 2007.

China is pouring billions of dollars into Sudan. Beijing purchases an overwhelming majority of Sudan's annual oil exports and state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. -- an official partner of the upcoming Olympic Games -- owns the largest shares in each of Sudan's two major oil consortia. The Sudanese government uses as much as 80% of proceeds from those sales to fund its brutal Janjaweed proxy militia and purchase their instruments of destruction: bombers, assault helicopters, armored vehicles and small arms, most of them of Chinese manufacture. Airstrips constructed and operated by the Chinese have been used to launch bombing campaigns on villages. And China has used its veto power on the U.N. Security Council to repeatedly obstruct efforts by the U.S. and the U.K. to introduce peacekeepers to curtail the slaughter.

As one of the few players whose support is indispensable to Sudan, China has the power to, at the very least, insist that Khartoum accept a robust international peacekeeping force to protect defenseless civilians in Darfur. Beijing is uniquely positioned to put a stop to the slaughter, yet they have so far been unabashed in their refusal to do so.

But there is now one thing that China may hold more dear than their unfettered access to Sudanese oil: their successful staging of the 2008 Summer Olympics. That desire may provide a lone point of leverage with a country that has otherwise been impervious to all criticism.

Whether that opportunity goes unexploited lies in the hands of the high-profile supporters of these Olympic Games. Corporate sponsors like Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, General Electric and McDonalds, and key collaborators like Mr. Spielberg, should be put on notice. For there is another slogan afoot, one that is fast becoming viral amongst advocacy groups; rather than "One World, One Dream," people are beginning to speak of the coming "Genocide Olympics."

Does Mr. Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games? Do the various television sponsors around the world want to share in that shame? Because they will. Unless, of course, all of them add their singularly well-positioned voices to the growing calls for Chinese action to end the slaughter in Darfur.

Imagine if such calls were to succeed in pushing the Chinese government to use its leverage over Sudan to protect civilians in Darfur. The 2008 Beijing Olympics really could become an occasion for pride and celebration, a truly international honoring of the authentic spirit of "one world" and "one dream."

Mr. Farrow, a student a Yale Law School, traveled to Darfur as a UNICEF spokesperson in 2004 and 2006. Ms. Farrow, an actor, has traveled twice to Darfur and twice to neighboring Chad. She has recently returned from Darfur's border with the Central African Republic.

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COMMENTARY

The Truth About China

By GUY SORMAN
April 20, 2007; Page A15

The Western press is full of stories these days on China's arrival as a superpower. A steady stream of Western political and business delegations visit Beijing, confident of China's economy, which continues to grow rapidly. Investment pours in. Crowning China's new status, Beijing will host the 2008 Summer Olympics.

But after spending all of 2005 and some of 2006 traveling through China -- visiting not just her teeming cities but her innermost recesses, where few Westerners go, and speaking with scores of dissidents, Communist Party officials, and everyday people -- my belief that the 21st century will not belong to the Chinese has only been reinforced. True, 200 million of China's subjects, fortunate to work for an expanding global market, are increasingly enjoying a middle-class standard of living. The remaining one billion, however, are among the poorest and most exploited people in the world, lacking even minimal rights and public services. The Party, while no longer totalitarian, is still cruel and oppressive.

Its mendacity has been fully displayed in China's AIDS crisis. The problem is gravest in Henan province, where an untold number of poor peasants contracted AIDS during the 1990s from selling their blood plasma -- a process that involves having their blood drawn, pooled with other blood and then, once the plasma has been removed, put back into their bodies. China didn't conduct HIV tests and therefore ended up infecting donors by giving them back tainted blood. Victims are now reportedly dying in the hundreds of thousands.

The government's initial reaction was to deny that the problem existed, cordon off AIDS-affected areas and let the sick die (a pattern that the government tried to repeat when SARS broke out). In this case, police barred entry to villages where infected people lived (new maps of the province even appeared without the villages). Forced to acknowledge the problem after the international media began reporting on it, the Party nonetheless continues to obfuscate.

When Bill Clinton visited Henan in 2005 to distribute AIDS medicine, for example, the Party prevented him from visiting the worst-off villages. Instead, in Henan's capital city, he posed with several Party-selected AIDS orphans as the cameras clicked. It was an elaborate public-relations charade: China, with the West's help, was tackling AIDS!

Had Mr. Clinton been given a tour by Hu Jia, a human-rights activist, a far grimmer picture would have emerged. Only 30, he is a democrat and a practicing Buddhist who favors Tibetan independence. In 2004, Mr. Hu gave up studying medicine to look after Henan's sick. Months after Mr. Clinton's photo-op, Mr. Hu and I traveled to one of the villages that the former president missed: Nandawu, home to 3,500 people. It's not hard to visit -- you can get past the police checkpoint at the village's entrance by hiding under a tarpaulin on a tractor-trailer, and the police fear AIDS too much to enter the village itself.

What I saw there, however, will remain with me forever. The disease inflicts at least 80% of the families there; in every hovel we entered an invalid lay dying. Most of the sufferers had no medicine. One woman put a drip on her sick husband, a man who has been bedridden for two years and who is covered with sores. What did the bottle contain? She didn't know. Why was she doing this? "I saw in the hospital and on television that sick people had to be put on the drip."

As long as Mr. Hu worked alone to help the sick, bringing them clothes, money and food, the Party left him alone. But he has recently drawn attention to himself by urging the victims to form an organization that can demand more from the government. The Party will sometimes put up with isolated dissent, but it won't tolerate an "unauthorized" association. Several months ago, the government placed Mr. Hu under house arrest in Beijing.

But dissent cannot be stifled everywhere. There has been an explosion of revolts in the vast countryside. The government estimates the number of public clashes with the authorities (some occurring in the industrial suburbs too) at 60,000 a year. But some experts think that the true figure is upward of 150,000 and increasing. When, in late 2006, I reached one village in the heart of the Shaanxi Province after a 40-hour journey from Beijing by train, car and tractor, I saw no trace of an uprising that had taken place a month earlier. Alerted by a text message sent from the village, the Hong Kong press had reported a violent clash between the peasants and the police, leaving people injured and missing or even dead, with the authorities spiriting away the bodies.

I pieced together the reasons that had provoked the uprising. The village had a dilapidated school, without heating, chalk or a teacher. In principle, schooling is compulsory and free, but the Party secretary, the village kingpin, made parents pay for heating and chalk. Then a teacher came from the city who wanted to be paid more than his government wages. He demanded extra money from the parents. Half of the parents, members of the most prosperous clan, agreed; the other half, from the poorer clan, refused.

A skirmish erupted, and the teacher fled. The Party secretary tried to intervene and was lynched. Then the police roared in with batons and guns. The school has reopened, the teacher replaced with a villager who knows how to read and write but "nothing more than that," he admits.

The uprisings express peasants' despair over the bleak future that awaits them. Emigration from the countryside might be a way out, but it's not easy to find a permanent job in the city. All kinds of permits are necessary, and the only way to get them is to bribe bureaucrats. The lot of the migrant -- and China now has 200 million of them -- is to move from work site to work site, earning a pittance at best. The migrants usually don't receive permission to bring their families with them, and even if they could, obtaining accommodation and schooling for their children would be virtually impossible.

The fate of Chinese citizens often depends on where they are from. Someone born in Shanghai is considered an aristocrat and conferred the right to housing and schooling in Shanghai. Someone born in a village, however, can only go to the village school, until a university admits him -- a rare feat for a peasant. An American scholar, Feiling Wang, had come to China to study this system of discrimination, which few in the West know about, but the government expelled him.

Villagers often told me that it wasn't the local Party secretary whom they most hated, but rather the family-planning agents who enforce China's one-child policy, often subjecting women to horrific violence. The one-child policy is not only monstrous, it is yielding an increasingly elderly population in need of care -- a problem that a poor country like China is unprepared to handle.

Will China's surging economic growth end the rumbling discontent? Not according to the esteemed economist Mao Yushi, under house arrest for asking the government to apologize for the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. He doesn't trust the Party's claims of a 10% annual growth rate -- and why believe the official statistics when the Party lies so consistently about everything? Doing his own calculations, he arrives at a rate of about 8% per year, vigorous but no "miracle," as some in the West describe it.

Moreover, he believes that the current growth rate isn't sustainable: natural bottlenecks -- scarcity of energy, raw materials, and especially water -- will get in the way. Also, Mr. Mao says, the fact that investment decisions frequently obey political considerations instead of the market has helped generate an unemployment rate that is likely closer to 20% than to the officially acknowledged 3.5%.

Many in the West think that Chinese growth has created an independent middle class that will push for greater political freedom. But what exists in China, Mr. Mao argues, is not a traditional middle class but a class of parvenus, newcomers who work in the military, public administration, state enterprises or for firms ostensibly private but in fact Party-owned.

The Party picks up most of the tab for their mobile phones, restaurant bills, "study" trips abroad, imported luxury cars and lavish spending at Las Vegas casinos. And it can withdraw these advantages at any time. In March, China announced that it would introduce individual property rights for the parvenus (though not for the peasants). They will now be able to pass on to their children what they have acquired -- another reason that they aren't likely to push for the democratization of the regime that secures their status.

Because China's economy desperately needs Western consumers and investors, China's propagandists do all they can to woo foreign critics. "Do you dare deny China's success story, her social stability, economic growth, cultural renaissance and international restraint?" one Party-sponsored scholar asks me in Paris. I respond that political and religious oppression, censorship, entrenched rural poverty, family-planning excesses and rampant corruption are just as real as economic growth in today's China. "What you are saying is true, but affects only a minority yet to benefit from reforms," he asserts.

Yet nothing guarantees that this so-called minority -- one billion people! -- will integrate with modern China. It is just as possible that it will remain poor, since it has no say in determining its fate, even as Party members get richer. The scholar underscores my fundamental assumption: "You don't have any confidence in the Party's ability to resolve the pertinent issues you have raised."

That's true. I don't.

Mr. Sorman is the author of "The Year of the Rooster," Fayard (2006). This article was adapted from the spring issue of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.