The Republic

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The Republic is a new online only publication and one of the first privately owned media companies to come out of the Chinese Revolution. It profiles itself as an independent publication with an international focus and a strong research department to hold both the Chinese government and the global community accountable. Its articles are published online in Chinese and English. It also publishes a monthly magazine in Mandarin and English within Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, and in English only everywhere else in the world where it is allowed to publish. The Republic is owned by Jack Ma, the founder of the widely successful Alibaba Group.

 

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Opinion: Do Not Redwash Communism

President Ming Yi is the President of the Republic of China, as a sign of her commitment to a free press she has agreed to sometimes write opinion pieces for The Republic. We are honored for the January 2006 edition, the first issue of the printed magazine, to feature her opinion piece.
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Like all tyrannies in history, often the corpse of the regime isn't even cold before the revisionists try to change history. Nazi apologists were already trying to play down the holocaust as Hitler's brains were still spilling on the floor of the Fuhrerbunker and communists were already writing the gulags and invasion of Poland out of memory before Gorbachev had even been couped. So too already people are trying to change our own history. However in addition to the threats of domestic revisionists, we now too need to fear international attempts. In a recent seminar the Prime Minister of the Socialist Republic of Thailand made the bold claim that the horrors of the Soviet Union were the result of the Cold War and the United States opposition to it, and that the policies of liberalization led to the tyrants we had to suffer in our own country.

Let me ask this of you the reader, if the Cold War led to the worst excesses of the Soviet Union, how can the Thai Prime Minister explain the Purges between 1919 and 1945 at the hands of Stalin? Or the murder of tens of thousands of former Polish Officers and Intelligentsia in Katyn? Or the creation of the Gulag system which was third only to the Nazi Concentration Camps and Japanese Unit 731 facilities in horror? All of these started decades before the Cold War and between 1941 and 1945 saw the Soviet Union even receiving food, weapons and economic aid from the United States in its war against Nazi Germany as part of the Allies.

Then the bold-faced lies regarding the People's Republic of China. Let me ask the Thai Prime Minister what was so great about the Great Leap Forward amd the Cultural Revolution? Other than the collective 60 million deaths? A number almost larger than the current population of Thailand and only over half of the nearly 100 million people that died under Mao Zedong due to starvation, ethnic cleansing and other atrocities. Even after his death his successors until the late 1990's only ever liberalized on paper as a way to thaw relations with the United States without fundamentally changing any of the economic systems and certainly without changing the centralization of tyrannical power in one man.

Hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens have stories of atrocities committed against them, and every Chinese person at least knows someone who was killed or tortured by the communists. These are not their stories to tell but I will break with my personal shame and share my story with the world. A story that I did share in the past with the Thai Prime Minister and well before he gave his seminar. My father was a good and honest man, he truly believed in equality of classes and while always critical hoped that communism would bring a freedom that the Chinese people had never known before. My mother was as loving as a mother as one could be. She cared not only for my sister and me but also all the children in the neighborhood where we grew up. As an investigative reporter my father earned a decent living but our family was by no means wealthy as perhaps our lineage to the Ming dynasty might have implied.

We lived a good life, until my father in his resolve to the truth and a free society discovered corruption at the highest levels of the Yunnan Party, the Party Secretary appointed by Mao originally himself. Despite warnings my father kept his investigation going, convinced that in the new China the government would at the very least fight corruption. Even if the guilty party was one of their own. Until one night, my 8th birthday, a group of soldiers dressed up as common thugs broke into our home. They grabbed my father, mother and sister. If it hadn't been for one of the soldiers having a conscience after he recognized me as one of his son's friends and hiding me in a closet while claiming he couldn't find me anywhere, they would have grabbed me too.

My father was beaten up in front of my mother and sister's eyes, then after beating him just shy of losing consciousness they sexually assaulted and murdered my mother, only to do the same to my sister. Only then, after hours of torture did they beat my father up once more and finally ended his life with a final shot. By that point he had been begging for death for hours and to at least spare his wife's and daughter's life. I saw it all, when a neighbor called the police after hearing the commotion the investigation was done in record time and declared a robbery gone wrong. Despite nothing being stolen, testimony of neighbors and my own eyewitness testimony. The Communists only ever punished one person, the soldier who had saved me and as a punishment for his 'disloyalty' they murdered his family too. Until this day those responsible walk free, the Party Secretary is comfortable retirement in Cuba and the soldiers untraceable. The many people above and below who knew entirely in the clear.

I am not writing this story for pity, I am writing it to show the experiences of over a billion Chinese people. So let me ask you, Your Excellency, do you truly think this was a better China than our current administration? A China where reporters are not only able to investigate the government but are even protected by that very government as they do. A China where rapists and murderers are brought before justice. A China where corrupt officials are fired and prosecuted. A China where a young child can live free of the fear of one day losing their family at the hands of government goons.

The Republic of China is the first time in history that the Chinese mainland has known true popular representation and democracy. The first time that everyone truly was equal. That one could make it to the highest office in the land only by virtue of their own merit and not their family's wealth or connections. It is this free and liberal China where we do not need to force our citizens to stay by banning emigration and instead are seeing many Chinese return. It is this China that is securing friendships with states across the world and political spectrum. It is this China that pursues peace with its neighbors instead of plotting war over minuscule land gains. It is this China that reflects the will of the Chinese people.

Your Excellency, if you had been a citizen of the People's Republic of China and given the seminar you gave you would at best have been put in prison and more likely executed. Most certainly when Mao Zedong still ruled.

This opinion piece was a guest column, the next article will again be by one of our permanent reporters.