freediver wrote on Apr 1
st, 2024 at 10:56am:
thegreatdivide wrote on Apr 1
st, 2024 at 10:51am:
freediver wrote on Apr 1
st, 2024 at 10:10am:
In China, all power emerges from pieces of paper. The CCP is never responsible.
You still hung up on "pieces of paper".
Implementation of power is defined on "pieces of paper" in any legal system.
The CCP is in power because a piece of paper says they are in power. Not because they are a bunch of communist thugs who killed tens of millions of Chinese people.
The CCP started in China in 1921. Between 1927 and 1949 they fought a civil war to try to take over China. This spanned WWII. The CCP, as well as several other parties, agreed to fight with the Chinese government during WWII, against the Japanese. However the CCP did bugger all to help the Chinese people fight the Japanese.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_United_Front
Quote:However, the Communists submission to the chain of command of the National Revolutionary Army was in name only. The Communists acted independently and hardly ever engaged the Japanese in conventional battles. The level of actual coordination between the CCP and KMT during the Second Sino-Japanese War was minimal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War
About 15 million Chinese people died in the civil war started by CCP. The CCP won under Mao in 1949. That's when the killing really began.
The CCP killed 1 to 2 million Chinese people during a campaign from 1957 to 1959 to get rid of other political parties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Rightist_Campaign
However, the real enemy of the CCP was not other parties, but the Chinese people themselves. First came the Great Leap Forward and the Great Chinese Famine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
The CCP introduced forced labour and "struggle sessions", which got people to denounce friends and family as enemies of the state and collectively humiliate, beat and torture them. They banned private ownership of land, which destroyed the way of life for most peasant farmers. The farmers were then essentially forces into communal slave labour under CCP bureaucrats who did not know how to farm, but did know how force them to sleep in the fields to make them work harder.
Up to 55 million people died. 6 to 8% of them were tortured to death or executed. A lot of these people were the wealthier farmers and food merchants, or anyone who criticised what was going on. The rest mostly starved to death. A lot of Chinese people turned to cannibalism.
Eventually the CCP bureaucracy and their paperwork announcing big agricultural surpluses was unable to cover up the stench of millions of rotting corpses. Mao got a bit embarrassed and retreated from power for a while. He managed to lay blame on everyone else. Eventually he reclaimed power and made another attempt to do the same thing. They called this one the cultural revolution. This is where Mao's little red book came from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
1 to 2 million people died, and tens of millions were persecuted, including intellectuals, scientists, and the powerful political moderates who had kept China in relative peace while Mao was sulking. Mao encouraged breakaway factions to take the law into their own hands. There was violence and Chaos across China, including several massacres. There was more cannibalism, this time more a celebration of violence than a response to starvation. Schools and universities were closed.
During the famines and slaughters, the CCP managed to convince the Chinese people to feel sorry for the poor starving Americans. There was limited awareness of what was going on outside China.
Mao died in 1976. Reformists took over, but arguments over policy grew and eventually led to the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. It is hard to tell how many people died, due to ongoing coverups.
During the 1990's there was a rapid transition towards capitalism, which the CCP is now attempting to stall or reverse. This resulted in a massive increase in wealth and living standards. However, the culture within the CCP has not really changed. They have learned that they can get away with literally anything. The Chinese people remain largely ignorant of how much wealthier westerners still are compared to them.
The covid outbreak started in late 2019 and early 2020. The travel season for Chinese new year starts mid January and lasts for about 40 days. It is obviously the worst possible thing you can do at the start of a new pandemic. Rather than try to halt the spread of the virus, the CCP covered it up, which meant travel continued as normal, which helped the virus spread and pushed up the death toll. Around 7 million people died worldwide. This number relies heavily on government estimates - the CCP still insists that less than 0.1 million people died in China.
After initially covering up the virus, the CCP did a dramatic backflip and introduced some of the strictest lockdowns in the world. This included welding the doors of apartment buildings shut to stop people getting out.