Chapter 33: America’s Anti-Communist Lessons (Part 7)

IV. Communism Does Not Fight for Equality for the Poor

The greatest historical lesson of America’s anti-communism is this: Americans have never personally experienced the mass death caused by communist practice, nor have they felt, in their own flesh, the anti-human essence of communism. Because of this lack of direct experience, well-intentioned Americans were able to “embrace the panda.” Only by going through communist devastation themselves can political elites and society truly understand it; only through such lived experience can there be genuine awakening; and only after full awakening can a consensus and determination emerge to overthrow communist regimes.

What does communism “communalize”? It communalizes the property of the rich—indeed, the property of all who own anything. Whose lives does the revolution take? The lives of all who oppose the Communist Party. Whoever opposes the Party loses their life. This is the reality of communism.

Some claim that “communism brings equality to the poor.” This is the greatest lie of the twentieth century and the cruelest deception inflicted upon the poor. Communist revolutions have brought catastrophe and death to the poor on a scale too vast to record. Five years after the Soviet communist revolution, a massive famine erupted, killing millions—mostly poor people. Under the banner of “fighting for equality for the poor,” the Communist Party incited the poor to violent rebellion, yet the deepest and heaviest victims were precisely the poor themselves.

During China’s Great Famine, enormous numbers of abnormal deaths occurred. The Soviet Union decided to provide China with three million tons of grain, but Mao Zedong flatly rejected the offer. Mao told his personal physician Li Zhisui and his secretary Tian Jiaying:

“Starving to death is a minor matter; losing political integrity is a major one. China has hundreds of millions of people—what’s the big deal if tens of millions die? Won’t the population recover in a few years? Why should we eat Khrushchev’s charity food?”

In 1927, Mao Zedong led the Red Army into the mountains and became a bandit, engaging in looting, killing, and arson. Ordinary soldiers lived in extreme hardship, yet Mao, as the gang leader, lived in mansions, had chefs and servants. Where was equality? During the long retreat from Jiangxi to Shaanxi—the Long March of several thousand miles—senior Communist leaders were carried in stretchers, with entire stretcher units of over a hundred soldiers assigned to carry them. When stretcher-bearers collapsed and died from exhaustion, soldiers were pulled from combat units to replace them. The march began with 100,000 people and ended with only 6,000 reaching Shaanxi. Not a single senior leader died; all who died were ordinary soldiers. Where was equality?

During the Yan’an period, Mao used slogans of democracy, freedom, and equality to disguise himself, deceiving many progressive young intellectuals into coming to Yan’an. Soon, however, they discovered that under communist hardship, “clothing was divided into three colors, food into three grades.” Communist cadres were strictly classified by rank: meals were divided into small, medium, and large kitchens; medical care was also rank-based. Where was equality? The young writer Wang Shiwei, outraged, wrote essays criticizing this system and calling for equality. He was quickly arrested, publicly struggled against, and eventually beheaded, his body thrown into a dry well.

After the CCP seized nationwide power, the special privileges and elitism of Party cadres surpassed even those of the Chiang Kai-shek era. Mao Zedong possessed dozens of palaces and villas across China. Senior officials were provided with chefs and nurses; even after retirement, they continued to enjoy the same privileges as when in office. Meanwhile, countless poor people remained destitute and malnourished.

The CCP appropriated Sun Yat-sen’s slogan of “equal land rights” and used “smash the landlords and distribute the land” to incite peasants to rebel. After seizing power, landlords were attacked and land was redistributed. For a brief period, peasants received land—but before it could even warm in their hands, Mao reclaimed it through collectivization and commune movements. Peasants were confined to “collectively owned” land, forming the largest population of serfs in the world—without land ownership and without freedom of movement.

Communism does not only seize the property of the rich; it also seizes the property of peasants. Peasants were stripped of land ownership, with all land rights concentrated in the hands of the Party. Landless peasants were led by the nose by the CCP. The Communist Party became China’s largest landlord. All land transactions were monopolized by the Party; peasants were left with only contractual cultivation rights. Peasants became servants of the Party.

After collectivization, peasants could only earn work points for labor. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms allowed peasants to contract land for farming and gain some freedom of operation, but land ownership remains firmly in the hands of the CCP. To this day, the CCP refuses to return land ownership to peasants.

Resistance to communist tyranny on the Chinese mainland has spread nationwide like dry tinder catching fire. Over the past decades, mass protest incidents have surged dramatically: fewer than 10,000 in 1993; 30,000 in 1999; 60,000 in 2003; 80,000 in 2005; 100,000 in 2007. From 2008 onward, the CCP stopped publishing official figures. According to estimates by Tsinghua University sociologist Sun Liping, there were approximately 180,000 mass incidents in 2010.

Since Xi Jinping took office in 2013, social contradictions have intensified further compared to the Hu Jintao era. At an estimated increase of 25,000 incidents per year, there were at least 260,000 mass incidents by 2020—an average of 700 per day. Participants include groups whose land was seized, migrant workers, victims of forced demolitions, laid-off workers, pollution victims, veterans, rural teachers, victims of toxic food and fake drugs, victims of shoddy construction, victims of officials’ land profiteering, victims of wrongful convictions, families of prisoners of conscience, and many others. Protests range from dozens to tens of thousands of participants.

Most of these incidents are violently suppressed. To crush public resistance, the CCP has built a massive armed police force numbering in the hundreds of thousands or even millions nationwide. Official “public security” or “stability maintenance” spending has for many years exceeded military defense spending. In 2013, national defense spending was 720 billion yuan, while stability maintenance spending reached 769 billion yuan. By 2019, stability maintenance spending had risen to nearly 1.4 trillion yuan—almost doubling in six years, reflecting the severity of social conflict.

Resistance is entirely spontaneous and unorganized, yet like dry tinder it is unstoppable. Even without external support and under brutal repression, it cannot be fully extinguished. Faced with more than 200,000 incidents annually—an average of 700 per day—of citizens resisting communist tyranny, the United States has a moral obligation to strongly condemn communist brutality and openly support the victims. Only through internal resistance combined with external pressure can the communist disaster be ended.

True improvements in the lives of the poor have occurred in Western countries. Since the 1930s, the United States has established social welfare systems to protect the unemployed and retirees, continuously expanding them over more than eighty years. Developed capitalist countries practice genuine democratic socialism, not communist states. Political rights are equal between rich and poor, and economic inequality gradually narrows—this is real equality.

The communist claim of fighting for equality for the poor has deceived the world for a century. Even today, some remain confused. French economist Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, mistakenly believes Marx’s Capital still has vitality and that Marxism should again be explored to achieve equality. Has a century of communist practice not proven that Marxist communism is a disaster? Is further theoretical debate still necessary? A hundred years ago, theoretical discussion was understandable—communism had not yet been implemented. But after a century guided by Marxist class struggle theory—producing totalitarian states, labor camps everywhere, and countless corpses—must we still debate its right and wrong?

It was precisely because Deng Xiaoping clearly understood the nature of communism that he proposed “not debating” ideology during reform and opening, deliberately obscuring the truth and misleading the United States.

Marx, the progenitor of communism, called upon the proletariat to overthrow the bourgeoisie and expropriate the expropriators. In reality, mobilizing the proletariat to rebel was merely a means. Once power was seized, those “rebels” who marched under the communist banner expropriated landlords and capitalists, then transformed themselves into a “new class,” simultaneously manufacturing vast numbers of new proletarians and class enemies. By stripping these new victims of economic and political rights, they lived lives thousands of times more luxurious than those of the old bourgeoisie. This classic act of fraud and deception originates with its creator—Karl Marx himself.