Extraordinary preparations are almost complete for the October 1 military parade to celebrate the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) seventy years ago. Important precautions have been taken so that no unfortunate events, protests, speeches, slogans or symbols spoil the occasion.
China has many reasons to celebrate. After suffering 150 years of humiliation due to internal disorders and intrusions through Western forces and Japan, China has once again become the dominant force in East Asia and has become a global superforce. Most of the country’s other 1. 4 billion people enjoy the benefits of prosperity development, which adds a higher standard of living, better public health, better education, greater career options, and better opportunities. Life for the country’s majority Han ethnic organization has stabilized, giving many a sense of greater privacy. safety.
But what China suffered to get there has all but disappeared from Chinese public memory. When Chairman Mao Zedong and his comrades seized power in 1949, they unleashed decades of loss and suffering. In recent years, President Xi Jinping’s repressive policies have revived fears that China’s social and economic progress will once again come at the expense of individual freedoms and non-public security.
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In the early 1950s, the Chinese Communist Party’s land reform expropriated the homes of tens of millions of landowners and terrified urban capitalists into giving in to the socialist transformation of their businesses.
By the mid-1950s, the party appeared to be on a broader path, creating a Soviet-influenced legal formula that limited the use of revolutionary people’s courts (kangaroo courts disguised as legal establishments) and anarchic wrestling sessions. and violent. violent. But during the brief Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1957, so many party grievances were expressed that Mao abruptly introduced the Anti-Right Campaign. Millions of civil servants, intellectuals, academics and lawyers were sentenced to what the party calls reeducation through labor, a supposedly non-criminal detention that involved years of harsh punishments.
This calamitous crusade was soon overtaken by the chaos of a new mass movement, the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1961, which plunged the country into an economic crisis and a famine that cost at least thirty million lives. In 1966, Mao introduced the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which pulverized the country for a decade, killing an estimated 3 million people and destroying the lives of another hundred million. This national nightmare only ended with the death of Mao in 1976 and the arrival of Deng Xiaoping, who replaced the president’s struggle for elegance with policies that led to impressive economic and social modernization of the People’s Republic of China.
Since late 2012, President Xi has relied on Deng’s so-called reform and opening-up, which has governed Chinese politics for more than three decades. But, building on a breakdown of Mao’s book, he also implemented measures to stifle dissent. , basically through arbitrary arrests.
Hundreds of thousands of people across China have been arbitrarily detained under Xi, including more than a million Muslims from the Xinjiang region, human rights defenders and lawyers, as well as several foreigners. They were deprived of their freedoms of movement and communication without having the opportunity to challenge these serious restrictions. Arrests are carried out through regular police, secret police, army government and Communist Party officials. Victims are sometimes held incommunicado, away from family, friends, lawyers, and other cellmates for a long, indefinite period. At most, some foreigners are entitled to very limited consular visits. The length of detention sometimes depends on the perceived cooperation of the detainee.
They are under immense pressure to comply with the demands of their captors. Physical and mental torture and forced confessions are commonplace, and if deemed useful to bolster propaganda, detainees are presented to the media before being officially charged. Even after their official liberation, many Chinese remain so limited that I have referred to their scenario as one of no liberation.
The arbitrary detention flagrantly violates the national law of the People’s Republic of China. Even under Xi, Chinese reformers have managed to introduce legislative and institutional innovations related to facets of the criminal justice formula and the legal formula as a whole. In 2014, the plenary consultation of the Central Communist Party Committee dedicated, as never before, to the implementation of the law through Xi’s government.
However, the party’s purpose is to impose greater dictatorship, not human rights. None of the recent speeches on the rule of law, document-based reforms, or institutional adjustments have limited the party-state’s ability to eliminate anyone it deems suspicious. Some measures, coupled with the 2018 constitutional and legislative amendments that created the National Supervision Commission, which is tougher than the country’s courts and prosecutors, have legitimized and, in particular, expanded the party’s long-standing detention practices. . Arbitrary detention also violates the obligations assumed by the People’s Republic of China through ratifying multilateral human rights treaties.
Beijing is now offering emerging countries a modernization style, marketing its achievements in a global propaganda effort. But Xi seeks foreign respect and influence by relying on more than the PRC’s impressive economic and military might and its hopes of matching the comfortable strength of liberal democracies. While the comfortable strength of these countries is generated through their political and religious freedoms and artistic creativity, that of the People’s Republic of China can be described simply as “development without democracy,” “authoritarian capitalism,” or, more recently, “technological tyranny. “Not only does China lag behind Western countries in traditional strength, but it also lags behind many Asian competitors, adding India, Japan, South Korea and, most infuriating for Beijing, Taiwan.
The crisis in Hong Kong demonstrates the biggest impediment facing Xi’s quest for comfortable power. Even as the protesters’ demands have intensified, their biggest domestic concern is that they will be extradited to the mainland and subjected to the People’s Republic of China’s unfair and corrupt justice system. This concern is based on daily reports of arbitrary detentions not only of mainland nationals, but also of others from Hong Kong, Taiwan and other countries, some of whom in the past held passports from the People’s Republic of China.
It is practice, not propaganda, that the world will have to focus on when evaluating the PRC’s comfortable claims of strength. Mao and Deng disagreed on many issues, but both believed that practice is more vital than theory. The other people of Taiwan and Hong Kong already know this and have their own experience. Taiwanese are regularly disappearing on the mainland and are only gradually reappearing under foreign pressure. Hong Kong has long suffered from the arbitrary detention of its contractors and others on the mainland. Recently, kidnappings have occurred in The People’s Republic of China has taken up positions in Hong Kong itself, as well as in Thailand, and those affected were citizens of Chinese origin who hoped that obtaining foreign nationality could protect them from threats to their freedom. These moves are expected to raise questions about conceivable collusion between Hong Kong and the mainland’s secret police.
One can only hope that before its 80th anniversary, with Hong Kong’s high-profile struggle, Taiwan’s continued freedoms and the pressures of global opinion, the PRC will assert its comfortable claims to strength by ending the scourge of arbitrary detention.