Why Did People Power Fail?

By David Chu

In the words of the English historian Lord Acton, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Red Sunday at Tiananmen Square proves that Communism is not about people or the "proletariat."  Communism is about power -- the absolute power which comes out of the "barrel of a gun."

This is what the students failed to understand.  They and millions of their supporters assumed that by simply demonstrating for changes within the system, the Communists would loosen their reins of power.  The result is quite to the contrary.

Any Communist official who has escaped to the West will testify that there is no hope of improving Communism.  The system is totally corrupt.  One of the highest ranking Communist officials ever to defect to the West was Major General Jan Sejna.  He wrote in his book, We Will Bury You:

Often, I look back across the years and think about my friends and colleagues in pre-Dubcek Czechoslovakia.  Most of us were ambitious, some of us were cruel and some were vain, others were corrupt and cowardly, and a few were simply naive.  But I am sure that all of us -- ministers, generals, commissars, and mere Party members -- were trapped in the system, unable to act or move or even think outside it.... [If] ever a system totally corrupted its servants, that was and is Communism; and when Communism is imposed by a foreign power as brutal and chauvinist as the Soviet Union, it not only corrupts, it degrades.

In Red China, there is no need for a foreign power to brutalize the people.  Fifty years of Communist rule proves one thing: Chinese blood flows freely whether the leader is the Great Chairman Mao Tse-tung or Mr. Deng Hsiao-ping or whoever else is in power.

Between 1949 and May 1965, the total number of Chinese killed by the Communists is estimated at 26,300,000.  The Soviets reported this figure in a radio broadcast on April 7, 1969.  They even gave a breakdown of the killings in four epochs.  So astronomical is the extent of the massacres that the Guiness Book of World Records gives Mao and his Red Chinese first place in the section titled "Crime: Mass Killings."  Hitler and his Schutzstaffel (SS) rank a distant third, behind the Soviets.

In July 1971, the U.S. Senate Committee of the Judiciary published the Walker Report.  It put the total number of dead somewhere between 32,250,000 and 61,700,000.

What the students and people everywhere forgot is this: the lives of the people are expendable in Red China.  To retain power at all costs is the motto of the Communists.  Sacrificing the few or the many to subdue the rest is their means.  History shows that this is the way the Communists operate.  The massacre at Tiananmen Square and its aftermath serves as a reminder.

Where the students could have accomplished more is in what they should have demonstrated for.

They sang Communist songs and eulogized Communist leaders like Mao Tse-tung and Hu Yao-bang -- the former Communist Party chief whose death sparked the student protest.  They wanted less official corruption.  They wanted more freedom.  They wanted democracy.  They wanted all of this under Communism.

The English historian Thomas Hobles once said, "Freedom is government divided into small fragments."  Communism is certainly its antithesis.

The students should have called for the overthrow of Communism itself.  The response could not have been more brutal than it was.  The student protesters were persecuted as "counter-revolutionaries" (i.e. anti-Communists).  Had they stood against Communism, the net result would have been the igniting of a revolution for genuine freedom.

As Mao acutely observed:

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous.  A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

The students cannot fight against the Communist hard-liners and, at the same time, demand more of their socialist system.  That is like fighting half a battle, which always leads to defeat.  It becomes a complete failure when the enemy wages total war as the Communists have done.

Nothing short of a revolution for freedom -- a revolution against Communism and the idolizing of Communist leaders -- will awaken and mobilize the people of Red China to overthrow their dictators.  The people are sick of the Communists and their power struggles.  Communism is like a disease.  The student protesters at Tiananmen Square had no power over it because they were infected by its beliefs and practices.

At the start of Mao's revolution, Communism was preached as an atheistic solution to all of life's problems.  Today, Communism is nothing but a hollow religion.  It is a perverted doctrine that solves no problems, but it helps to institutionalize power for the few.

During the Cultural Revolution, the people were forced to worship Chairman Mao.  Every good proletariat had to bow to the portrait of the ubiquitous leader morning and night.  Over seven hundred million copies of the Little Red Book of Mao's thoughts were distributed to every man, woman and child in Red China.  They had to study his bible, even as they are now forced to study the words of later communist dictators.

During "struggle meetings," the accused had to offer "self-criticism" and "confessions," not of guilt, but of whatever accusation is offered.  Is this the Communist way of confessing "sins"?  The Communists who conduct these struggle meetings even look like priests in their Mao suits!

This is the Communist China in which the students are raised.  Because they are brainwashed by the system, they even demanded the "rehabilitation" of Hu Yao-bang.  They demanded to rehabilitate a dead man.

Clearly, the students and the Chinese people must extricate themselves from Communism and socialism.  Only when the people have abandoned the system totally, can they defeat the Communists.

"If poisonous weeds are not removed," one often quoted line of Mao states, "Scented flowers cannot grow."

People power cannot flourish unless the people forsake Communism and socialism.  Then can they lay the foundation for constructive and lasting change for a new China.  That foundation can only be based squarely on the right of the individual to spiritual freedom -- freedom to pursue and worship truth, justice and liberty.  And part of that foundation must include the Three Principles of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, founder of the original Republic of China.  They are the universal principles of government "of the people, by the people and for the people."