Today, America turns two hundred and fifty years old.
During the day, the community where I live was filled with singing and dancing in a scene of peace and prosperity. As night falls, fireworks light up the night sky once again, and people raise their glasses to celebrate independence. Since the beginning of this year, the historical materials I have consulted the most have all been related to America. At this very moment, echoing in my ears once again is that deafening sentence written by Jefferson two hundred and fifty years ago:
“All men are created equal.”
This phrase once crossed oceans and spanned centuries, inspiring revolutionaries, abolitionists, women’s rights activists, and countless ordinary people. Many might not remember who wrote it, but they remember the phrase itself.
However, when that pen came to a stop, the man who wrote those words still owned his own slaves.
History is often like this. It is not always created by perfect individuals, but is frequently born in the fissures between ideal and reality.
And history should never be a biography of “saints”; rather, it manifests the tug-of-war between ordinary mortals and their ideals. Jefferson failed to achieve “equality for all,” but the phrase he wrote lived on to become a weapon for countless generations that followed.
The abolitionist movement used it to speak out; the civil rights movement used it to speak out… Today, there are still people using it to question America: Why does discrimination still exist? Why is there still a vast gap between the rich and the poor? Why are there new inequalities?
An unfulfilled promise has, conversely, become the sharpest yardstick. It first judged the man who wrote it, and it continues to judge this nation.
Thus, I cannot help but think of my own country, China.
I think the true confidence of a country does not lie in declaring itself free of problems, but in allowing its people to constantly point out problems. It lies not in demanding that everyone sing its praises, but in not being afraid to have its founding principles repeatedly examined.
Quisling and arguments are not terrifying, nor are divisions.
What is terrifying is when no one dares to ask questions anymore, causing the individual to lose the capacity to resist the collective. In the end, all questions are left with only one “standard answer,” which goes by a beautiful, grand, and Weiguangzheng (grand, glorious, and correct) term: Tongyi (Uniformity/Unification).
Two hundred and fifty years have passed, and America still has prejudice, tearing, interest groups, and all kinds of injustices.
Yet, the Declaration of Independence still stands right there.
It has not been deleted because it causes awkwardness; it has not been modified because it causes embarrassment; it has not become a taboo because it is constantly cited to criticize reality.
Fireworks are fleeting.
What truly remains in history are not the celebrations, nor the slogans, but that phrase written two hundred and fifty years ago: All men are created equal.
People may betray their own ideals. But the height of a country lies precisely in whether it allows its people to forever hold onto those ideals to make demands of reality.
What truly remains from celebratory events is not the applause or the brilliance of the fireworks, but whether people can continue to ask: How far are we still from those ideals written on paper? Because while humans may betray their ideals, ideals will, in turn, judge humans.
Two hundred and fifty years have passed. Today’s America still harbors prejudice, tearing, and quarreling, yet there are still those who believe that freedom and equality are worth continuing to fulfill.
I think what is truly great has never been a single person, but a single phrase.
And what makes this phrase resonate with power is generation after generation of people who hold fast to this motto.What a country truly ought to celebrate is not necessarily that it has achieved everything perfectly, or done everything well, but that it once wrote down a phrase that even it itself had not yet achieved, and allowed posterity to constantly use this phrase to hold it accountable.
From Strict Exit Bans to Not Stepping Out of the Province: Grid-ization Under Digital Surveillance and the Brittle Fracture of China’s Destiny
Author: Zhou Min
Within China’s state system (tizhi nei) in 2026, a suffocating physical siege is quietly spreading.
In the past, people’s attention was focused on the political red lines where civil servants, university teachers, and even medical personnel had their passports collectively confiscated and their international travel restricted. However, a deeper, more impenetrable net of control has now quietly unfurled within the country’s borders. Today, not only has going abroad become a luxury, but employees within the system must also undergo tier-after-tier of reporting and approval in digital personnel systems just to leave their city of employment, cross provincial boundaries, or even travel to their provincial capital during weekends or statutory holidays. As for “entering Beijing,” it has become a top-tier sensitive red line that must not be touched, and is absolutely never approved unless deemed strictly necessary.
This evolution from preventing overseas flight to comprehensive internal confinement tears away the veil of “prosperous stability.” It exposes a massive, deeply panicked leviathan that is attempting to quench its immediate thirst with poison—trading short-term security for the compression of individual freedom of movement.
This domestic travel restriction did not appear out of thin air; it is a specimen of everyday domestication, adapted from the Chinese Communist Party’s past success in transforming crisis control during extraordinary periods into routine governance.
Around 2015, with the intensification of the anti-corruption campaign, passport control over “naked officials” and personnel handling classified information became a norm. At that time, control had clear targets and class specificity. However, what truly placed physical shackles on the entire population and everyone within the state system was the digital epidemic-prevention grid established between 2020 and 2022. During those three years, through the Travel Code, Health Code, and the mutual liability system of “reporting when leaving the city, obtaining approval when leaving the province,” every individual was firmly pinned into the grids of administrative divisions.
After the smoke of epidemic-control technology cleared, people were astonished to find that this maturely functioning tracking and approval mechanism did not dissolve. Instead, it was seamlessly toggled into a steel claw for “political discipline” and “safety management.” By 2026 today, this steel claw has embedded itself deeply into daily life. Grassroots civil servants, teachers, and doctors in public hospitals—the moment their feet cross the administrative boundaries of a prefecture-level city, their movements are fully exposed on the system backend. What awaits them is, at best, a public reprimand, and at worst, disciplinary action affecting their political careers.
In essence, this is the resurrection of the Mao-era “Danwei (work unit) system” and the Qing Dynasty “Lijia system.” Living individuals have degenerated into the digital property of administrative units.
The Party is sacrificing the vitality of an entire society to lock 1.4 billion people—especially the civil servant and technical classes who form the backbone of society—into their respective administrative grids. Behind this lies a realistic and selfish political calculation:
First, it extinguishes all sparks of cross-regional networking to maintain absolute, localized political security.
Beijing and various provincial capitals are the centers of politics, resources, and power. Restricting grassroots personnel (mainly those who interact with grassroots conflicts and hold social resources within the system) from freely entering Beijing and provincial capitals completely severs, at the physical source, the risks of potential higher-level petitions, mass gatherings, or cross-regional rights-defense networking.
Second, through collective liability, it forces mid-level bureaucrats into trembling self-censorship.
The top-level design has instituted a mutual liability mechanism of “whoever is in charge of the person who errs will be held accountable,” naturally transferring the pressure of stability maintenance (weiwen) down to grassroots units. The instinct to save their official posts drives various leaders to implement escalating measures, preferring to over-regulate rather than make a single mistake. How cunning this design is: it requires no frequent red-headed documents from the central authorities; to avoid accountability, lower-level officials voluntarily tighten the noose tighter and tighter themselves.
Third, it enforces high-intensity psychological domestication.
When a person needs to submit an application, explain reasons, and account for their travel companions just to see a doctor elsewhere, take their child to a neighboring city to visit relatives, or travel to the provincial capital, their psychological submissiveness and dependence on the Organization are infinitely magnified. The atomization and docility of personnel within the system have reached an unprecedented height. Yes, unprecedented.
However, the march of history does not pivot according to the will of power. This ultimate rule of compressing free movement into gridded cages is paving a path toward systemic collapse for China’s future.
1. The Inward Squeezing and Depletion of the Economy: The essence of economics is the natural flow of people, capital, and information. Today, the class within the system—which possesses excellent consumption and investment power—is confined. Consequently, tourism, cross-provincial commerce, and technical exchanges sink into stagnant water. How can factors of production be matched and optimized? Capital can only sit idle locally, and what follows is the suffocation of innovation capacity and the drying up of economic vitality.
2. Social Social-Zombification: When the physical movement of flesh and blood is jammed, the clashing of thoughts and social mobility are locked up as well. The entire society gradually falls into a state where “ten thousand horses stand mute” (wanma qiyin—a classic idiom for total suppression of speech), and absolute silence prevails. Without the churning of social vitality and the passion of civic autonomy, nothing remains but a pool of stagnant water.
3. Black Swan Risks Under High Pressure: The free movement of people actually dilutes many localized conflicts. When someone encounters oppression or injustice from the local system, they can dissolve their pain and seek a new life by moving elsewhere and searching for a new space. Today, all channels are welded shut, and everyone is forcibly pinned into the vortex of local conflict at their point of origin.
Nowadays, the principle of “whoever approves is held responsible” has led to the total “lying flat” (tang ping) of the bureaucratic system. Aside from keeping watch over subordinates and engaging in inert stability maintenance, grassroots officials have lost any genuine desire to resolve real problems. Looking out across the landscape, one sees an area of ultimate, taut tension. A tiny, localized crisis (such as a local fiscal collapse or a sudden mass incident) could in the past be digested through social elasticity. But in the era of grid-ization, who knows on what day or in what place a total chain reaction will be triggered because the system has lost all its elasticity—leading to a massive, brittle fracture (da cuiduan).
Viewed from a macro-historical cycle, this posture of setting up tier-upon-tier of internal defenses while tightly shutting the external gates signals that China is actively abandoning the path of integrating into global competition and leveraging civic vitality to expand frontiers. Instead, it is retreating into an inward-looking, defensively postured, traditional centralized empire.
We are witnessing a massive regression born out of an extreme lack of security and an extreme fear of reality.
The rulers are leveraging long-term national destiny and the vitality of the entire society as collateral to exchange for a few years of immediate, physical, and precarious security.
The laws of history are densely written: the tighter the high-pressure iron curtain is welded, the more fiercely it blazes when it burns down. When even the cells within one’s own system cannot roam freely, where is the grandeur and prosperity? It is clearly nothing but an unmaskable trembling before reaching the end of the road. Those physical bodies trapped within the iron bars remain temporarily silent. But the reckoning of history has already begun to surge with dark undercurrents beneath the seemingly placid, dead water.
Politics and Democracy—Chapter IV: Characteristics of the Autocratic Regime
Author: Zhu Zhengming
(I) The Formation of the Autocratic Regime
If we turn the pages of the entire history of human development, we can say it is a history of struggle between oppression and anti-oppression, exploitation and anti-exploitation among human beings. Everyone possesses the desire to act willfully and to place oneself above others. In each stage of human social evolution, just like in other animal groups within nature, the phenomenon of the weak falling prey to the strong has always existed, and its cruelty is no less than that of the survival competition between any other species.
The contest of individual physical strength within primitive tribes produced tribal chiefs. The competition of strength among tribes produced regional lords. Armed conflicts among lords produced kings. The outcome of wars among kings produced emperors. Ultimately, a state system controlling an expansive territory was established. The emperor led both civil and military officials, as well as royal relatives and imperial kinsmen, dividing the nation into a number of regions, and then separately enfeoffing them to trusted ministers and royal aristocrats to guard and defend. These ministers and royal clansmen then subdivided their own jurisdictions into smaller fiefs, enfeoffing them to their own minor subordinates to rule. Bureaucrats proliferated in succession, and power was decentralized in turn, until the ruling power extended to villages, towns, families, and households. Ultimately, the typical power pyramid structure of a feudal autocratic society was formed. At the very bottom of this pyramid are thousands upon thousands of common citizens, and at the very top is the monarch, the emperor alone.
In a feudal autocratic society, the means by which the government obtains ruling power is violence, and the fundamental means by which the government maintains its rule remains violence. A feudal autocratic society is a social system that naturally developed and evolved after the productivity of human primitive tribal society advanced to a certain degree. When regional differences were quite significant, primitive tribes were numerous, and development was uneven, it once played a certain positive role in the dissemination of culture, the prosperity of commerce and trade, the progress of remote and backward areas, and the promotion of the development of productive forces. The feudal autocratic ruling model is a maintenance-oriented ruling model, strong in conservatism but weak in innovation. When people live in an unyielding, unchanging manner, the rulers still possess sufficient experience and energy to cope with various social problems. When society enters an era of reform and innovation, and a large number of unprecedented, newborn things emerge, the ruling model where everything is decided by the monarch alone immediately reveals its clumsiness. Even if the monarch is exceptionally shrewd, capable, clean, and devoted to public service, a situation will still arise where he has neither the experience nor the energy and time to cope. Consequently, errors caused by arbitrary decision-making will become common occurrences, and losses caused by negligence and delay will be too numerous to count, as the rigid system will visibly constrain and hinder the development of society.
The great discoveries in science and technology and the emergence of the industrial revolution brought human society into a brand-new era of industrial science and technology. Human understanding and capability to master nature experienced rapid and vigorous development, and social structures and lifestyles became increasingly complex. Autocratic society was no longer capable of adapting to the needs of this development, playing a severe role in obstructing social progress. It is necessary for us to carefully analyze the characteristics and maladies of this social structure, so that we can better understand it and break free from it.
(II) The Disadvantages of the Autocratic Regime
The autocratic system possesses a self-stabilizing mechanism within its organizational structure, capable of playing a basic role in maintaining social public order; therefore, it has been able to exist for a long time. From the perspective of social morphology, the autocratic regime exhibits the following five major disadvantages:
1. Arbitrary and Dictatorial Rule
The supreme ruler monopolizes all major power individually, deciding everything and dominating everything in state affairs. Society lacks the rule of law, and the individual will of the ruler is the law. Even if some legal clauses are promulgated, they are completely aimed at constraining the common people and serving the ruler. Officials at all levels can arbitrarily interpret and execute the law at their own discretion; however many officials a country has, that is how many kinds of laws exist. When the interests of the common people are infringed upon by officials, they are left helpless and have nowhere to turn for help. The sole recourse is to appeal to higher-level bureaucrats, but they will only be dismissed and sent to a reception office that possesses no real power whatsoever. The reception officials are either brimming with arrogance, showing complete impatience as if dealing with a psychiatric patient, or view the victims as making unreasonable disturbances, forwarding their materials back to the very officials who originally abused their power to create the unjust case, whereupon the victimized suffer even more intensified persecution.
The country lacks an independent legislative body of an elected nature. If a legislative body does exist, it is established according to the will of the ruler and exists in dependency upon the ruler, who can arbitrarily arrange the personnel composing the legislative institution based on his own will. Only those who can pass the careful screening and long-term inspection of the organization department, who are absolutely reliable politically, and who can consciously maintain ideological consistency with them, have the possibility of entering the legislative body. The legislative body is no different from a hand-raising machine and rubber stamp for the ruler, failing to play a role in restraining the ruler, who can formulate and amend laws at will. The judicial organs lack independent status; much like the legislative bodies, their personnel composition is designated by the ruler, and they act in accordance with the ruler’s will.
The centralized ruler holds all power within society, possessing the ultimate power of life and death over the lives of the common people. In such a society, acquiring official power and status is the sole way out for people to obtain privileges and freedom, and the officialdom is the only arena for all those who wish to display their personal capabilities. To obtain more power, property, freedom, and personal happiness, the only choice is to strive for a higher official position. Whether one can achieve this desire depends entirely on whether one can secure the personal favor of their superior, having absolutely nothing to do with whether the common people approve or not. Therefore, such a society is a paradise for all kinds of careerists, conspirators, and despicable individuals. They exert all their strength to win the favor of the ruler, catering to the hobbies of the dictator, flattering the foolishness of the aristocrats, and enduring their insults. They understand clearly that sacrificing their own dignity is the only effective and cheap means to preserve and promote their own positions. The dictator grows accustomed to those who willingly or under compulsion act as lackeys; living long among praises and smiling faces renders him obstinate and self-opinionated, leading a dissipated life. He will find that everything of his has already been considered in advance by others. Even though he manages the affairs of millions of people, in truth he does not understand these matters, and thus frequently hands over his official authority to subordinates to exercise. This enables low-level officials to also flaunt their powerful connections and bully others as they swagger through the streets, reclaiming their dignity in front of the common people and earning the optimal return for their obsequious brown-nosing.
The rulers cannot tolerate any differing opinions. Any dissent will sound extremely grating to them; regardless of whether its content is reasonable, it will first and foremost be deemed a lack of respect for themselves and a manifestation of disregarding the leadership. Under such a system, the greatest taboo is to contradict a superior; even if it happens only once, one might be permanently consigned to limbo. Consequently, those who truly possess talent, adhere to principles, and speak bluntly will only receive arrogant and contemptuous treatment, belonging to the category of those who are least qualified to be appointed. Such people must either yield their positions to politicians who are better at fawning, or abandon their own principles of conduct. Honesty and integrity are not recognized as virtues; instead, they are regarded as redundant and foolish character traits.
Whether one is submissive or not serves as the primary standard by which the powerful and wealthy measure the merits and faults of their subordinates. No matter how poor their moral character or how incompetent a person is, as long as they can show submission—and perhaps possess a touch of petty cleverness, knowing how to win the favor of the powerful and wealthy—they can receive promotions. Even if they are utterly incompetent, they can still remain officials for life. Therefore, those who are lucky are often conspirators or swindlers. After gaining power, the incompetent and tyrannical nature of these people is quickly exposed to its fullest. To those above, they are slaves; to those below, they become slave owners. Looking from top to bottom, one sees blossoming, sunflower-like smiling faces; yet looking from bottom to top, one sees only the ugly necks of the officials.
The ruler, of course, also understands what the purpose behind his subordinates’ various efforts is. Therefore, he also frequently gives the cold shoulder to those seeking positions to test whether they are truly loyal, sometimes intentionally leaving certain positions vacant to keep them in a state of hope and anticipation for a long time, so that he can effectively control and tame them. He knows that when he has completely satisfied all their demands and can no longer provide new benefits, they are highly likely to cast him aside and seek refuge with a new master.
The dictator has no sense of trust in his subordinates; they do not trust anyone. They frequently find that even those they trust the most are lying to them, thereby believing that everyone has bad motives and improper intentions. They do not understand the meaning of the word freedom; upon encountering any dissent, they panic and lose their bearings, constantly remaining on guard against anyone posing a threat to their own official power and status. They fear any form of non-governmental organization, seeing every bush and tree as an enemy soldier, and stand ready at any moment to pinch them out in their infancy.
They treat dissidents brutally, viewing these individuals as the most dangerous enemies, subjecting them to physical torture, sentencing them to labor re-education, banishment, or even death. They regard the common people as ignorant and foolish mobs, maintaining a high level of vigilance, and stand ready at any moment to deploy the armed forces to suppress assembly operations of any scale. For those detained and arrested, they inflict cruel and inhumane torture.
Externally, the dictator is militarily aggressive and wages wars of aggression. They frequently go to war over personal squabbles, dragging the country into warfare, driving thousands upon thousands of common citizens to slaughter one another on the battlefield, and spending enormous amounts of state funds on researching and manufacturing killing weapons. The cause of war, at times, is merely for the ruler to flaunt his strength and fight for face. They know that inciting xenophobic sentiments, or even launching a war, is an effective means to divert the citizens’ attention away from domestic political corruption, enhance social cohesion, and strengthen their personal power, while conveniently crowning themselves with the laurels of a national hero.
Under such a regime, officials at all levels are awed and subdued by the dictator’s authority. When the dictator makes an erroneous decision, even though many people will detect its mistake, they lack the capability to point it out and correct it. Most absurd of all, decisions made by the dictator under conditions of drunkenness and mental derangement will still be implemented and executed as if they were imperial edicts.
However, despite the fact that the dictator is filled with a sense of wariness toward the common people, remains indifferent to the hardships of the common people, and is utterly unconcerned with the voice of the common people, they still do not forget the need to display their gentleness to the public. On a whim, they will also travel to remote, impoverished areas and, under the prerequisite of absolute security, sit together with simple villagers, affectedly striking a pose to let a large retinue of accompanying journalists take group photos, so as to show that they are close to the common people.
2. Hereditary Stratification
Under this system, people are divided into various classes and ranks by the rulers based on their family background. These ranks prescribe people’s place of living and the occupations they can engage in. The rank is lifelong; without making tremendous efforts or contributions and receiving the consent of the upper-level rulers, no one is permitted to change it. Sometimes, even the burial location after death is stratified according to status.
Ranks and classes possess a hereditary nature; those of the lower orders are born as lower-class people, and their descendants continue to maintain the exact same identity as them. Lower-class people typically have received no formal cultural education, or have only received a bit of the most basic cultural education. Upper-class people, on the other hand, naturally belong to the ruling class; they are born into families of the ruling class, receive the most complete education, and they themselves will also become members of the ruling class. At the absolute apex of society are the imperial court aristocrats, who hold office for life and transmit their official positions and power to their own posterities. At the absolute bottom are the common citizens who possess no rights whatsoever. Between these two, there exists a series of different ranks and strata. While each rank accepts the rule and domination of the rank above it, it has a larger population of the rank below available for it to dominate. This makes bureaucrats at all levels feel that though they fall short of those above, they surpass those below, with each possessing a certain sense of satisfaction and their own vested interests. While maintaining their own vested interests, they intangibly and automatically promote the stability of the entire social state.
In this system, the reason why many people possess power is purely due to their blood relationships with the original rulers; in reality, they are neither wiser nor more capable than the people they rule. The rigid hierarchical system ruthlessly fixes every individual into a set position; although doing so makes management easy, it constitutes an astonishing waste of human talent. In this system, mediocrities of noble birth often secure excellent positions and treatment, whereas people of low birth seeking development encounter all kinds of obstacles and restrictions. In order to solve the basic problem of food and clothing, they have no choice but to toil all day long, frequently exhausting their lifelong energy for the sake of some pitifully small objectives. Even for a genius, his chances of achieving success in his career are far fewer than those of a mediocrity of noble birth.
3. The Spoils System
In the early stage of the emergence of states, if the power of a band of robbers who had no territory and lived on highway robbery developed to a certain degree and captured a piece of territory, they would substitute highway robbery by collecting protection fees from the local citizens, while putting on the mask of a protector to become a member of the local forces. When local forces fought each other for territory, they were in fact fighting for the right of control over the common people. This control did not depend on whether the local citizens agreed or not to exist; it depended solely on whether they possessed sufficient military force. The emergence of the state reduced the frequent armed conflicts among local forces, but it did not alter the nature of this rule.
An autocratic government carries out wanton plunder against the common people economically. They can formulate tax laws at will, forcing the citizens to pay all kinds of high and exorbitant taxes and levies, monopolizing the operation of highly profitable industries, and deploying state treasury funds to construct various luxurious facilities for their own enjoyment. When a fiscal deficit occurs, they arbitrarily print and issue currency. No one dares to audit their finances, let alone dares to establish an oversight system for their accountants. The state treasury is their own private vault, and the common people are their inexhaustible and endless source of wealth. Domestically, among the bureaucrats at all levels, the spoils are divided proportionally, rationally enjoying the money and wealth extorted from the common people. They will also by no means forget to allocate a portion of the financial revenue to maintain a massive army. Citing the name of defending the country, in reality they painstakingly privatize it so that it remains loyal only to themselves, ready at any moment to be used to extinguish resistance coming from the common people.
Even if isolated individuals within the ruling class still possess compassion for the common people when they first come to power, after long-term immersion in such an officialdom, they will also become muddle-headed and tyrannical, turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to the hardships of the common people. Because the support of the common people cannot elevate their official positions, and the spurning of the common people will not reduce their remuneration. Their relationship with the common people is one of domination and obedience; they have no need to expend excessive energy on the common people. What decides their positions and futures is entirely whether the superior trusts them.
Due to the lack of a permanent mechanism for supervision and constraint, the laissez-faire attitude of superiors allows corruption to exist ubiquitously among government bureaucrats at all levels. Bureaucrats will not be satisfied with a “rational” distribution of benefits; they frequently invent all sorts of pretexts to collect various extra fees from the common people to line their own pockets, or, when faced with bribes, sacrifice the interests of the broad masses of common people for the sake of their own negligible personal benefits. Superiors turn a blind eye, permitting subordinates to use their power and influence to reap benefits as a return for the subordinates’ tributes.
4. Obscurantist Policy
The cultural education and communication media of society are uniformly controlled by the government. There is no freedom of speech or freedom of the press and publication; without the permission of the government, no publication can be published or distributed. The outcome of implementing this obscurantist policy, at times, also fools the rulers themselves.
Regarding the ugly phenomena within the ruling clique, the rulers block information to prevent the common people from knowing. When policy errors caused by the irresponsibility or corruption and incompetence of officials result in heavy losses to the common people or to social property, they fabricate facts, concoct storylines, and create false impressions to fool the common people. While they internally scramble for power and profit, cheating and outwitting one another, they deliberately present an appearance of getting along harmoniously and sharing close intimacy before the public. They suppress different ideological concepts, forbidding criticism of the unreasonable aspects of their ruling model. They are haughty and conceited, rejecting foreign cultures and failing to accept the merits of other ethnic cultures. They alienate themselves from the mainstream of the international society, becoming a solitary soul outside the international family. Domestically, they detach themselves from the masses, protected by the mist of government authority, keeping the common people ignorant of the political inside story and the sources of policy. They pose as profoundly knowledgeable instructors, their mouths full of grand principles to lecture the populace, portraying any development of society as their own great political achievement. To the few literati who are willing to clamor on their behalf, they dispense small favors and kindnesses, ruling the entire society in the primitive fashion of the carrot and the stick.
Blinding the eyes and ears and muddying people’s minds is a weapon of any successful ruler. In the absence of any other sources of information, the obscurantist policy can successfully enumerate to the common citizens the countless advantages and inevitabilities of the social status quo, attributing all developments of society to the rulers and causing the common people to display an obedience colored by admiration. For their policy errors and various problems arising in society, they can also always find all kinds of big and small excuses, allowing the media they control to produce explanations advantageous to themselves.
In this way, they use a meticulously planned and densely woven net to cover the entire society, forming an independent ideology. People can only think about problems within the scope of this ideology in a government-permitted, uniform manner. Even the most creative spirits and those with the most resolute will cannot break through this net to become leaders of social reform.
As for those isolated and weak opponents, before their insights can appear in the press and before their personal capabilities can show any prominence, the rulers will immediately deal them a head-on blow and crush them to death. Under such brutal crackdowns, society is incapable of producing any valuable political insights.
As time goes on, the common people are deceived by various false appearances and develop misunderstandings toward various social phenomena. Knowing neither their own society nor the true conditions of the outside world, they leave the populace of the entire society spiritually decadent and ideologically demoralized.
That thousands upon thousands of citizens in a society are cowed and subdued by a handful of rulers through pure methods of terror is the most disgusting and disappointing spectacle of human society.
Under this kind of feudal autocratic rule, it is impossible for ordinary people to have any say whatsoever in the behavior of government officials, let alone apply their own wisdom and will to guide and alter the behavior of the government. They can only obey the orders of the government, or even helplessly allow the government to infringe upon their own rights and interests. If anyone who cares about the political issues of the country is unable to exert any influence on them, and instead faces considerable danger that makes it impossible to maintain a basic livelihood, they will become indifferent to political issues and public affairs, turn a blind eye to the corruption of government officials, remain unmoved by the decay of social morals, and even lose all interest in the planning, sanitation, and public security of their own streets, believing those are entirely the government’s business. Ultimately, the citizens care only about their own lives, focusing their energy on how to better arrange the narrow space in which they live, and how to scramble for a bit more negligible interest for themselves in a crowded society. They lack the spirit of resistance, and have even entirely lost the capacity to generate discontent. They are numb to all social problems, possess no sense of social responsibility, and live at the absolute bottom of society—turning into a herd of timid, submissive cattle and sheep that only know how to work, allowing themselves to be slaughtered and enslaved at will, while government officials become their shepherds.
In such a society, the common people often believe in the mandate of heaven and fate. They believe that their situation, encounters, fortunes, and misfortunes are all predestined by fate, and whether one can accomplish a certain thing depends entirely on one’s own luck. They believe that kings, generals, ministers, bureaucrats, and aristocrats are born to be rulers. With extremely simple and pure feelings, they shed tears of gratitude for the negligible subsidies returned and heavily played up by the rulers. Meanwhile, the rulers do not forget to crown their own regime with the beautiful name of “the people,” holding power in the name of the people, which makes it highly deceptive.
The result of the government’s implementation of the obscurantist policy forms a vicious cycle of ruling: the autocratic government controls the communication media of society to manufacture the obscurantist policy; the obscurantist policy creates a vast number of common people who resign themselves to fate; and the common people who resign themselves to fate subsequently support and bear up an all-controlling autocratic government, as shown in Figure 4.1, going round and round in a vicious cycle. There is a saying in political science that goes, “A people get the government they deserve.” This saying has its merit, and the reason is very simple, because a government should be built upon the consent of the people. However, in an uncivilized, powerful, and autocratic society, this saying also holds true in reverse: “A government gets the people it deserves.”
In such a society, the common people often believe in the mandate of heaven and fate. They believe that their situation, encounters, fortunes, and misfortunes are all predestined by fate, and whether one can accomplish a certain thing depends entirely on one’s own luck. They believe that kings, generals, ministers, bureaucrats, and aristocrats are born to be rulers. With extremely simple and pure feelings, they shed tears of gratitude for the negligible subsidies returned and heavily played up by the rulers. Meanwhile, the rulers do not forget to crown their own regime with the beautiful name of “the people,” holding power in the name of the people, which makes it highly deceptive.
The result of the government’s implementation of the obscurantist policy forms a vicious cycle of ruling: the autocratic government controls the communication media of society to manufacture the obscurantist policy; the obscurantist policy creates a vast number of common people who resign themselves to fate; and the common people who resign themselves to fate subsequently support and bear up an all-controlling autocratic government, as shown in Figure 4.1, going round and round in a vicious cycle. There is a saying in political science that goes, “A people get the government they deserve.” This saying has its merit, and the reason is very simple, because a government should be built upon the consent of the people. However, in an uncivilized, powerful, and autocratic society, this saying also holds true in reverse: “A government gets the people it deserves.”
Holding the big stick of powerful crackdowns in one hand and the anesthetic of the obscurantist policy in the other, the autocratic ruler can cope with any strong-willed resistance. As long as the obscurantist policy can fully exert its effects, autocratic rule can be maintained for a long time.
5. Routine-Bound and Stagnant Conservatism
The bureaucrats and aristocrats are accustomed to ruling in a routine and conventional manner according to the ways left behind by their ancestors, because their ancestors lived very well by doing so, and they are well-satisfied with their own positions. Only when the development elements or productive forces of society undergo changes will the bureaucrats and aristocrats reveal their own incompetence; they lack any capability whatsoever to adjust their own organizational structure in a timely fashion to adapt to the new situation. Rulers are all selected and generated by old rulers from among a few reliable close relatives they are familiar with; their knowledge and concepts are identical to those of the old rulers, and they cannot break away from the domain of the vested interest groups. This method of selecting leaders cannot guarantee that successors will possess excellent leadership qualities, knowledge, and talents, nor can it guarantee that they can secure the admiration and support of other veterans and high officials in the government. Therefore, except for the first-generation leaders, successors all have no choice but to let the aristocratic veterans share a portion of the power. It is very difficult for powerful figures to emerge in the government who possess the capability to carry out structural restructuring and reform of the government to make it adapt to the development of productive forces.
When society remains unyielding and unchanging, they still possess a certain capability to conduct management; but when social morphology undergoes changes, the government will appear at a loss as to what to do, with internal management falling into chaos and promulgated policies contradicting one another. As a result of internal political power struggles, a group of older individuals who are rich in officialdom experience frequently gain the upper hand. These individuals follow the beaten track and cling to old customs, ultimately turning the government into a backward, conservative, and reactionary stronghold that opposes change.
In such a society, when the power of the rulers is absolutely secure, they are still relatively mild and magnanimous; when their power becomes weak, or after the holders of power become old and decrepit, they will become stubborn and unconvertible. When the lifestyle of the ruling class becomes a habit and is fixed down, their prejudice and opposition toward change will become deep-rooted. Making any alteration to their lifestyle will become extremely dangerous, even encountering hysterical retaliation. The reaction of such a society toward change is just like a psychiatric patient who roars upon seeing a doctor, unable to tolerate anyone putting a hand on his defects, studying his illness, and thinking of ways to cure his disease.
Under this ruling model, due to the obstructing effect of the massive vested interest groups occupying the dominant position, the development and progress of society can only occur intermittently and are inefficient. Each change can only be implemented by replacing muddle-headed and tyrannical political leaders through methods of violence and coups, thereby triggering social turmoil, accompanied by bloodshed or even consecutive years of internal wars, causing enormous human, financial, and material losses to the entire society. Alternatively, the entire society pays a long price in time, waiting for the natural death of the supreme ruler, pinning its hopes on the possibility of an enlightened and rational new leader coming to power. Yet, tragically, under the best medical and healthcare conditions, rulers are often long-lived, while the new rulers, except for their age, possess a mode of thinking that is an exact replica of the old rulers. This causes those people who harbor illusions about the social system and a beautiful life to unconsciously pass through their youth and middle age in the midst of waiting, only to usher in their own twilight years.
An autocratic system is not entirely incompetent and ignorant; at times, there are also civilized and enlightened autocratic governments. When society is under the rule of an enlightened and wise leader, it can also be managed in an orderly fashion. It can construct some great human engineering projects, organize powerful armies, resist foreign invasions, and even conquer neighboring countries to establish vast empires—even though this kind of strength often does not endure longer than the lifespan of a single generation.
For the rulers, autocratic rule is the most convenient, natural, and comfortable way of ruling. Rulers can do as they please, fully enjoying the pleasures of being human. Even if the country is very poor, the rulers can still enjoy a lifestyle that only the rich in wealthy countries can afford: access to the most advanced medical equipment, the highest-grade means of transportation, the most precious and expensive food and utensils, and the most luxurious palaces. If wanting to do as one pleases is human nature, then as far as human nature is concerned, no ruler is unwilling to rule in this manner. Therefore, although the autocratic regime is an unfair, inhumane political model with obvious defects, it still possesses a powerful vitality. In human history, there have been quite a few precedents where democratic regimes, under circumstances where the populace lacked sufficient vigilance, unconsciously evolved into autocratic regimes.
Editor: Huang Jizhou Proofreader: Feng Reng Translator: Ge Bing
Today is American Independence Day. It is a day that should originally be worthy of grand celebration.
On July 4, 1776, the American Declaration of Independence proclaimed to the world: all men are created equal, and that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inherent, unalienable rights endowed upon mankind. For someone who has lived through an autocratic society, the word “freedom” has never been a mere slogan; rather, it is something that countless individuals have traded their very lives to attain.
However, on this year’s Independence Day, I find myself completely unable to rejoice.
Just two days ago, on July 2, a Tibetan in exile—Lobga Rangzen—set his own body on fire in front of the United Nations Headquarters. I can no longer remember which number this is among all the Tibetan self-immolation incidents I have come to know. Yet, every single time I hear such news, I fall into a long, profound silence. Because this is far more than just a piece of news.
Beginning in 2009, I worked and lived in the Ngawa (Aba) Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province for over five years. In the dozen or so years that followed, the trajectory of my life has unfolded almost entirely around Chengdu and Ngawa. Perhaps because I was once an NGO volunteer, perhaps because I am engaged in cultural heritage preservation, or perhaps simply because I enjoy drinking, chatting, and treating the local people with absolute sincerity, I have had the opportunity to hear many stories that ordinary people will never know.
Among these narrators, there were establishment insiders who once participated in the crackdown operations, as well as the relatives, friends, and classmates of those who were suppressed.
They told me how they fired their weapons at Tibetans; they described what the bodies looked like after being shot dead; they recounted how captured Tibetans were escorted into military compounds, stripped naked, and then locked into iron cages welded together from rebar (threaded steel). The height of those cages was only sufficient for an adult to crawl on all fours. They were confined inside for prolonged periods, exposed to the blistering sun and biting wind, forced to eat, drink, sleep, and relieve themselves entirely within the confines of the cage.
There were others who recounted how they, alongside the soldiers, smashed their rifle butts into any Tibetan who dared to raise their head, and how they stood atop the iron cages, urinating on the people inside to humiliate them. To this very day, these images remain vividly frozen in my mind.
At the same time, I have listened to many Tibetan friends recount the ordeals suffered by their own relatives, friends, and classmates. Some were left permanently disabled, while others lost their lives forever.
I even once had a prolonged, deep conversation with an elderly Tulku (Living Buddha) who had just returned from meeting the 14th Dalai Lama in India. He was the biological uncle of a Tibetan brother of mine. To my astonishment, he spoke extremely flawless and standard Mandarin. He said: “This Mandarin of mine was learned during the eighteen years I spent behind bars in the Communist Party’s prison.”
At that exact moment, I fell into a long silence.
Prior to 2009, I had never truly set foot in China’s ethnic minority regions—until the Wenchuan earthquake completely altered the course of my life.
Leveraging my identity as a volunteer, I traveled across numerous Tibetan-populated areas in Sichuan and Qinghai; I also visited the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, and once lived for over a month in the home of a Kazakh friend in Xinjiang. These experiences thoroughly transformed my understanding of the plight faced by ethnic minorities in China.
During my childhood, in the city where I lived, one could frequently see Xinjiang vendors pushing small carts to sell raisins and mutton skewers, or Khampa men with Tibetan knives strapped to their waists, squatting by the roadside selling traditional Tibetan medicine. I used to secretly snatch their raisins and stealthily touch the Khampa men’s knives. They never once lost their temper at me for these antics; they would always smile with pure, honest benevolence.
Later on, everything slowly began to change.
Various rumors about them began to circulate incessantly throughout society. Some said that Tibetans would draw their knives at the slightest disagreement. Others claimed that people from Xinjiang were thieves, scammers, and acted with tyrannical lawlessness. Some even asserted that even if they committed murder, the police could do nothing about it. Gradually, people began to fear them and ostracize them.
Near the Wuhou Temple in Chengdu, I witnessed the following scene on more than one occasion: a Tibetan would be walking completely normally on the sidewalk, yet the Han Chinese walking from the opposite direction would actively veer away to bypass them. Meanwhile, that Tibetan had done absolutely nothing. It was only later that I came to understand that this fear did not stem from real, lived interactions, but rather from protracted propaganda. Because I subsequently came to know more and more ethnic minority friends, I began to discover an entirely different world. They were not so-called “lawless” elements at all. Quite the contrary. In many instances, they bore a system of management far more severe than that imposed on ordinary Han Chinese.
My Xinjiang friends told me that for many years, they have not dared to speak their native language in public spaces. They dared even less to readily admit their religious faith. Because once they admitted it, what awaited them next would very likely be endless, grueling interrogations. Some lost their freedom as a result. Some were sent to the so-called “learning centers” simply because they got drunk, had a minor street altercation, or due to trivial matters that would seem completely insignificant to an outsider. Once there, their families did not even know where they had been taken.
I once went on a road trip with some friends from Xinjiang. Every time we crossed a checkpoint, my local friends had to step out of the vehicle to have their ID cards checked, fingerprints recorded, and irises scanned. Meanwhile, as a Han tourist, I only needed to sit inside the car and wait. Every single time, I felt an acute, profound sense of discomfort.
I finally realized: despite living within the very same country, people of different ethnicities face worlds that are diametrically opposed.
Many Han Chinese simplisticly conceptualize Tibetan monasteries as merely places to “burn incense and worship Buddha.” But only after truly living there did I realize that this is far from the whole truth. A monastery is not just a religious site. It is also a school, a hospital, a cultural hub, and a vital sanctuary where language, art, and history are kept alive and passed down. It is within those walls that many Tibetans learned how to read and write. Therefore, when monasteries are restricted, it is not merely religion that is impacted; it is the very continuity of an entire ethnic culture.
Not long ago, Article 6 of the newly promulgated law stated: “The consciousness of the Chinese nation’s community is the foundation of ethnic unity. The State adheres to enhancing commonality while respecting and accommodating differences…” These are beautiful, pleasant words. However, whether a society genuinely respects differences should not be judged by what it writes, but by what it actually does.
True ethnic unity does not mean forcing all ethnic groups to become more and more identical. Rather, it means that every single ethnic group is granted the complete freedom to preserve its own language, culture, faith, and way of life.
Many people will refer to the departure of Lobga Rangzen as a “self-immolation.” But in my heart, I have always felt that he did not die from the flames of that particular day. What truly pushed him, step by step, toward those flames was the reality of the long-term oppression weighing upon an entire nation’s culture, religion, language, and freedom of belief.
If a person could freely express their faith, freely inherit and pass down their culture, and freely live upon their own ancestral land, I believe that no one would ever choose to terminate their own life in such an excruciatingly painful manner.
Therefore, with every instance of a Tibetan self-immolation, what I see is never merely the death of an individual. What I see is an entire nation crying out to the world, over and over again. It is also a human being, in the final moment of their life, still telling this world:
“We are still here. We have not given up.”
Lobga Rangzen, I did not know you. But because I once lived in Ngawa (Aba), because I have heard all too many stories of Tibetans, and because I have lived, worked, and shared drinks with many Tibetan friends, today, when I see your name, I know with absolute certainty that this is far more than just a piece of news.
Your departure forces me once again to recall those people whom I have seen, whom I have heard of, and whom I can never, ever forget.
Your flames did not illuminate the buildings of the United Nations, yet they brought a shred of light and warmth to me. They serve as a stark reminder: Do not remain silent!
Continue to speak out about the things you know. Even if it is only to let more people know that there once existed such a person in this world, who, for the sake of his own nation, culture, faith, and dignity, chose to set himself ablaze.
Today, America celebrates its independence. As for me, I prefer to dedicate this day to a human being who burned his own life for the sake of freedom.
Lobga Rangzen, please rest in peace.
May your name never be forgotten as the news cycle passes.
May your sacrifice be more than just a momentary flash illuminating the night sky; may it transform into the courage for more people to pursue freedom, dignity, and truth.
I salute you. I also extend my deepest, most profound respect to all those who endure suffering for the sake of freedom, for faith, for ethnic culture, and for human dignity. May there come a day when no one ever needs to burn their own body again just to tell the world: freedom, by right, belongs to every single human being.
Editor: Zhang Zhijun Proofreader: Zhou Min Translator: Shen Meihua
The Party’s Pawns: A Secret History of the CCP’s Export of Revolution
Author: Tuo Xianrun
Part II: The Fate of the Biological Son—The Communist Party of Malaya and the Communist Party of Thailand
In 1961, Chin Peng, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM), secretly arrived in Beijing.
The purpose of his visit was very clear: to tell the Chinese comrades that the CPM could no longer keep fighting. From a force of over 10,000 at the end of World War II, they had dwindled to fewer than 600 men hiding out in the jungles along the Thailand-Malaya border. They had fought for over a decade, yet had achieved absolutely nothing. The British had left, Malaya had achieved independence, and the new government’s counter-insurgency campaigns against the CPM were becoming increasingly effective. The number of people in the jungle grew fewer by the day, and securing supplies became harder and harder. Chin Peng was prepared to announce the abandonment of armed struggle and lead the remaining men out to negotiate, in order to trade their weapons for a path to survival.
The person who received him was Deng Xiaoping.
Deng Xiaoping told him: The situation in Southeast Asia is on the verge of a massive shift, becoming increasingly favorable to communism; do not alter your policies, and you must keep fighting on.
Chin Peng went back and kept fighting.
Eighteen years later, in 1979, Chin Peng was summoned once again to meet with Deng Xiaoping. This time, Deng Xiaoping told him: China will no longer support the CPM; you will have to find your own way.
Two conversations, with the exact same person, yielding entirely opposite directives. No one has ever tallied how many people died between these two conversations, and no one cared.
The history of the CPM was planted with the seeds of tragedy from its very first day.
In 1925, Borodin, a representative of the Communist International, dispatched an assistant southward to the South Seas (Nanyang), establishing the Nanyang Communist Branch in Singapore. This was the earliest predecessor of the CPM. From day one, it was an overseas branch of the Chinese Communist Party; it did not grow naturally from the soil of Malaya, but was planted there. In 1930, under the stewardship of Ho Chi Minh, the Nanyang Communist Party was formally reorganized into the Communist Party of Malaya. The party members were almost exclusively overseas Chinese, the leadership was entirely Chinese, the funding for building the party came from China, and the political program was dictated by China.
This congenital condition later became a fatal weakness that the CPM could never escape. The Malaysian government framed the CPM’s armed struggle as a war of Chinese domination over the Malays, making it impossible for the CPM to ever truly mobilize the local masses. The banner you flew was that of communist revolution, but the local Malays saw only a group of Chinese wielding guns coming to rule over them; politically, this war was already half-lost from the start.
Yet, during the Japanese occupation of Malaya, the CPM briefly became the most critical armed force on this land. The British provided them with weapons, and the CPM formed the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), which controlled over two-thirds of the territory on the Malay Peninsula, with armed personnel exceeding 10,000. That was the only period in the history of the CPM where they were truly powerful, and it was also the closest they ever came to victory.
Then, a man named Lai Teck appeared.
Lai Teck was an overseas Chinese of Vietnamese nationality who claimed to be a representative of the Communist International. When he entered the CPM, it happened to be during a hiatus when all communication between the Chinese Communist Party and Malaya had been completely severed, so absolutely no one could verify his identity. Relying on this status, he established a firm foothold within the CPM and made his way all the way up to Secretary-General.
No one knew that he was simultaneously working for the French, the British, and the Japanese.
In February 1942, the CPM decided to convene a secret meeting at a place called Batu Caves, attended by most of the high-ranking commanders of the CPM and the Anti-Japanese Army. The Japanese received advance notice, surrounded the site, and slaughtered everyone down to the last man. That was the most tragic and horrific purge in the history of the CPM, where virtually all of its core backbone died. Lai Teck was originally supposed to attend, but at the last minute claimed his car had broken down and failed to show up.
After the war, once again in the name of a Communist International representative, he persuaded the CPM to disband the armed forces they had painstakingly built up, saying they should pursue the path of legal struggle and avoid direct confrontation with the new colonial government. The CPM believed him and handed over their guns. Then, he absconded with all of the party’s funds and vanished.
In 1947, he was recognized in Bangkok, Thailand, by members of the Communist Party of Thailand, who pursued him and shot him dead right on the street.
Only after Lai Teck’s death did the CPM begin a thorough investigation, discovering that behind every single thing he had done back then lay the shadow of betrayal. The massacre at Batu Caves, the disbanding of the armed forces—every time the CPM suffered a heavy blow, Lai Teck was the biggest beneficiary. But by this time, the man was dead, the evidence was gone, and everything could only be a matter of inference.
It took the CPM a full decade just to stand back up from the destruction caused by Lai Teck. During these ten years, a foreign spy had hollowed out the CPM, a fact which in itself illustrated the fundamental problem of the CPM: it lacked roots truly dug into the soil of Malaya; stripped of Beijing’s command and protection, it was nothing more than a heap of loose sand.
After Lai Teck was gone, the true terminator of the CPM emerged. This person was not the British military, nor was it the Malaysian government, but a young lawyer named Lee Kuan Yew.
In the early 1950s, Lee Kuan Yew returned from studying at Cambridge in the United Kingdom and began practicing law in Singapore. He took the initiative to approach the front organizations of the CPM, as well as various left-wing trade unions and labor groups, offering to help them fight lawsuits and providing free legal aid. He moved like a fish in water within these organizations, quickly becoming the person with the most extensive network of contacts in Singapore’s left-wing circles.
Then he put forward a proposal: to establish a legal political party called the People’s Action Party (PAP), and to strive for political power through parliamentary elections. His reasoning was solid—the CPM was an illegal organization that could not enter parliament and could only fight guerrilla warfare in the jungles, and guerrilla warfare had already proven to be unviable. It would be better, he argued, to take the legal route and channel their strength into the system. The people of the CPM felt that this line of thinking made sense, so they began to support him with all their might, helping him canvass votes, helping him organize workers and students, and building up his popularity bit by bit.
In 1959, the People’s Action Party won the Singapore general election, and Lee Kuan Yew became the Prime Minister of the State of Singapore.
Once political power was in his hands, Lee Kuan Yew began to take action.
The way he took action was one by one; it was not a blanket sweep, but rather precision strikes. First were those with a CPM background—anyone with organizational ties was arrested across the board and thrown into prison, detained indefinitely without trial. Some were locked up for over a decade, some were detained until their hair turned white, and some were detained until they died in prison. The Internal Security Act gave him this power; no evidence was required, no court of law was needed, a single piece of written order was enough.
Next were the people dispatched by the Chinese Communist Party’s southern intelligence system, which was that group of underground workers appearing in the capacities of scholars, teachers, and journalists. This group of people he did not imprison; instead, he politely deported them, seeing them off with utmost courtesy, even bidding them farewell before they left. Nanyang University was at that time the most important education and training base for the Chinese Communist Party in Malaya; Lee Kuan Yew shut it down directly, claiming it was to be merged into the University of Singapore, offering a high-sounding rationale that no one could refute to his face.
Finally, there were those left-wing colleagues who had once helped him campaign, helped him canvass votes, and sent him into parliament. Among these people were his comrades-in-arms, his friends, and those who had stood up to support him in his darkest hours. He sent them into prison one by one under the charges of colluding with the Communist Party and threatening national security. Some of them stayed in prison for nearly thirty years, and were already old men by the time they came out.
Lee Kuan Yew was later hailed by many as a rare political genius in the ethnic Chinese world. This assessment is probably correct. But the price of genius was borne with their entire lives by those who had helped him. The CPM and the left-wing forces sent him into parliament, and he used their corpses to consolidate his own power, subsequently establishing an efficient authoritarian system unique in the ethnic Chinese world.
The CPM in Singapore was thus completely wiped out.
Having lost Singapore, the CPM retreated into the jungles of the Malay Peninsula to keep fighting. But they faced a dilemma that was fundamentally unresolvable: the leadership was Chinese, and waging an armed revolution in a Malay-majority country would forever be framed as an invasion by foreign forces. They persisted in the jungles, persisting year after year; their numbers grew fewer and fewer, supplies became increasingly difficult, and their connections to the outside world grew weaker and weaker.
What life in the jungle was like has rarely been described. Most of those who stayed inside for decades left no written records. Occasionally, someone would reminisce, speaking of the perennially damp jungle, decaying leaves, food that was never enough, and nerves that were constantly on high alert. They married, bore children, and grew old, spending the best years of their lives inside that jungle. Their children were born in the jungle, and some of these children had never even seen the outside world.
All of this was because of Deng Xiaoping’s phrase back in 1961: “you must keep fighting on.”
In 1979, Deng Xiaoping visited Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew told him to his face: If you want to build good relations with ASEAN countries, you must stop supporting the communist parties in Southeast Asia. Deng Xiaoping agreed, and then summoned Chin Peng, telling him that China would no longer support the CPM.
The secret base that China had established for the CPM in Yiyang, Hunan was shut down, the Voice of the Malayan Revolution radio station ceased broadcasting, and all weapon supplies and funding were completely cut off. CPM cadres who had been trained in China were repatriated; those CPM cadres who had spent many years in China and learned to speak fluent Mandarin discovered overnight that they had nowhere to go.
Having endured for another ten years, in 1989, the CPM finally reached the end of the line.
Under the witness of the Thai government, the CPM and the Malaysian government signed a peace agreement. The CPM announced its dissolution, its members laid down their arms, and swore allegiance to the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (Supreme Head of State) of Malaysia. In exchange, the Malaysian government promised not to pursue legal liability, offered a sum of resettlement compensation to those willing to return to the country, and allocated several plots of land for those staying in Thailand to reside on.
At the time of dissolution, there were still about 1,000-odd people left, a mere fraction of the original 10,000-plus force.
One part of the population returned to Malaysia, collected their money, found a place to live out their days, and never mentioned the past again. The other part remained at the border of southern Thailand, moving into several villages allocated by the Thai government. These villages were later bestowed with the name of a Thai princess and transformed into tourist attractions called the Princess Chulabhorn Villages, totaling four villages. Tourists go there to drink coffee, take photos, and buy local souvenirs made by the residents; no one tells them what was once buried in the soil beneath their feet, nor would they ask.
Chin Peng wanted to return to Malaysia, but was rejected by the government. He waited in Thailand for many years and passed away in Bangkok in 2013, ultimately failing to return home. He was forty years old when he went to Beijing to meet Deng Xiaoping for the first time, and eighty-eight when he died. Throughout these forty-eight years, he handed over the best years of his life entirely to a war destined to fail, and how long this war would be fought, or to what extent it would be waged, was never something he could decide.
The story of the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) is highly similar to that of the CPM, only its ending is even more bizarre.
The CPT was even more pure-bred than the CPM. It was directly established by the Nanyang Branch of the Chinese Communist Party in 1926, and formally founded as a party in 1942. Its first Secretary-General, Li Qixin, was a CCP member who later returned to China to serve as the Deputy Director of the Xinhua News Agency Hong Kong Branch. What the Xinhua News Agency Hong Kong Branch was during that era is perfectly understood by anyone in the know—it was the core agency of the CCP’s intelligence and united front system in Hong Kong, operating under the cover of a news organization while actually carrying out intelligence work. The CPT’s first Secretary-General was himself a man of the intelligence system. What kind of relationship such a party shared with the CCP goes without saying.
In 1960, the Sino-Soviet split occurred, and communist parties worldwide were forced to declare their stance and choose a side; the CPT was the first communist party in Southeast Asia to openly support China. No discussion was needed, and no consideration was required, because they were simply a part of the CCP system. In 1962, China established the Voice of the People of Thailand radio station in Yunnan and began broadcasting revolutionary propaganda to Thailand. In 1965, the CPT formally commenced its armed struggle, with China providing training, weapons, and funds in full support.
The CPT fought for ten years, advancing steadily and building quite stable base areas in the mountainous regions of northern and northeastern Thailand. The year 1976 was the highest highlight of their history. That year, a military coup occurred in Thailand, and a large-scale student movement erupted in the universities of Bangkok; the military suppressed it, and many people died. Large numbers of students and intellectuals fled into the jungles to join the CPT. The armed forces rapidly swelled from a few thousand to 8,000 men, and their controlled areas expanded to affect nearly half of Thailand’s provinces. The Thai government was highly tense for a time, believing that the revolution was truly coming.
But in 1979, everything was over within a matter of a few months.
China decided to unite with Thailand to jointly confront Vietnam, and could no longer maintain its support for the CPT. The Voice of the People of Thailand radio station ceased broadcasting, and all aid was cut off. Under pressure from Vietnam, Laos expelled all CPT armed forces within its borders, causing the CPT to lose its most vital rear base. Without aid and without a path of retreat, the CPT disintegrated rapidly. Most members accepted the government’s offer of amnesty and left the jungles one after another. By 1991, the armed forces had completely vanished.
Yet, one matter has remained a mystery from beginning to end.
The leadership of the CPT prior to 1976 was almost entirely composed of ethnic Chinese, who were cadres directly trained or dispatched by the CCP. After the CPT dissolved, the Thai government did not place these people on wanted lists, did not put them on trial, and did not even issue a single amnesty decree, acting as if these individuals had never existed. Where they went has no public record whatsoever. The Thai government does not speak of it, and the Chinese government does not speak of it either; there is a tacit understanding between the two sides, and this matter was pressed beneath the surface of the water, never to float up again.
In the history of the CCP exporting revolution, vanishing is the best outcome. It means that after you return, you are still one of our own, and you can still be properly settled within the system. Those who left behind their names, conversely, are the ones who were truly abandoned. Chin Peng left behind his name, so he died in Thailand. The ethnic Chinese leadership of the CPT did not leave behind their names, so they returned quietly, vanishing from historical records to start anew in another place.
The CPM fought for sixty-four years, from its party founding in 1925 to its dissolution in 1989. The CPT fought for twenty-five years, from 1965 to 1991. These two most loyal, biological sons of the CCP spent their entire lives acting in accordance with Beijing’s directives. When Beijing said fight, they fought. When Beijing said stop, they stopped. They were never truly independent, and they never made a single major decision based on their own judgment.
In the end, the ordinary soldiers of the CPM grew old and died in foreign villages that had been transformed into tourist attractions, the ethnic Chinese leadership of the CPT quietly vanished from historical records, and those who died in the jungles did not even leave behind their names.
Chess pieces are just chess pieces; when they are used up, they ought to be put away. As for what the chess pieces themselves think, it is never within the consideration of the chess player.
Editor: Li Jing Proofreader: Zhou Min Translator: Ge Bing
The Party’s Pawns: A Secret History of the CCP’s Export of Revolution
Author: Tuo Xianrun
Part I: The Hand Behind the Curtain
In northern Burma in 1969, a group of young Chinese people were running up a mountain in tears.
They carried ammunition but had no guns. Their mission was to deliver the ammunition to the tunnels at the top of the mountain for the comrades holding out inside. From the staging area to the foot of the mountain was about one kilometer; American artillery fire had turned this kilometer into a corridor of death. A survivor later recalled using high-powered binoculars to watch more than a hundred people charge out—after the artillery smoke cleared, only three people made it into the tunnels. The next day, another group of people charged upward in tears.
These people were Chinese Red Guards, members of the defeated factions from the factional violent clashes of the Cultural Revolution. Someone had quietly told them that if they went to Burma to fight, their political stains could be wiped clean with a single stroke; returning after the war would count as participating in the revolution, and everything in the past would be forgiven. Thus, they crossed the border and joined the guerrilla forces of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB). At the peak, there were more than 10,000 Chinese people fighting in the jungles of northern Burma.
No one told them that within the CPB, there was a secret directive: this group of Chinese was to be placed on the front lines of combat to be gradually consumed.
They were not soldiers; they were cannon fodder. And the person who decided their fate sat in an office in Beijing, having never once set foot in Burma.
During the same period, half a globe away in Jordan, a group of Palestinian guerrilla fighters was captured by the Jordanian army. King Hussein of Jordan ordered that a specific group among them be isolated and detained separately from the other prisoners. This group consisted neither of Palestinians nor Jordanians; they were Chinese—military advisors blended into the Palestinian Fatah armed forces.
They taught Arabs how to fight in the desert, teaching Mao Zedong Thought, teaching “encircling the cities from the countryside,” and teaching how to establish grassroots mass organizations. This incident was later suppressed; both the Jordanian government and the Chinese government did not want to blow it out of proportion. Consequently, this group was quietly repatriated, and this piece of history vanished from public records.
Further north, in Flushing, New York, an unwritten rule circulated within the Chinese community: if intelligence personnel sent from China got into trouble, as long as they ran into Flushing, they could safely change their identities or leave the United States. This rule is not recent; its foundations began to be established in the 1930s. After decades of management, Flushing had become a safe zone that any external force found very difficult to penetrate.
In Japan, when a woman named Fusako Shigenobu was arrested in 2000, her passport contained records of entering China more than twenty times, and her total cumulative time living in Beijing was nearly two years. She was the leader of the Japanese Red Army, a core figure in a terrorist organization that had operated in the Middle East for decades. The Japanese Metropolitan Police Department believed that the Japanese Red Army maintained a secret base in China. The Chinese government neither admitted nor denied this.
The Chinese sent-down youth charging in tears through the jungles of northern Burma, the Chinese advisors isolated in Jordanian prisons, the secret networks deep within New York’s Chinatown, and the Japanese terrorists with verifiable records in Beijing—these stories took place in different countries and different eras, seemingly completely unrelated. Yet, behind them, the exact same hand was pulling the strings.
This hand is called the ILD (International Liaison Department).
The full name of the ILD is the International Liaison Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, formally established in 1951. Its official definition is an institution responsible for conducting exchanges and cooperation with political parties of various countries, making it sound like a protocol department dedicated to receiving foreign guests, exchanging gifts, and issuing joint statements. In 2024, the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) issued a formal warning to the Bundestag, stating that the ILD is an intelligence organization and urging German politicians to heighten their vigilance. When this warning was issued, the ILD had already existed for more than seventy years. It took the Germans twenty years to figure out who their opponent was.
This was not because the Germans were stupid, but because this institution inherently did not want you to know what it was.
The most core function of the ILD has never been “liaison,” but rather penetration. It incubated and controlled multiple communist parties in Southeast Asia, supported armed organizations in the Middle East, established secret base networks in the United States, and cultivated far-left forces in Japan. The tools it utilized included firearms and ammunition, clandestine radio stations, fake passports, political advisors, gang organizations, and election interference. It did all of this without ever appearing in the name of the Chinese government.
To understand what the ILD is, one can look at a specific individual.
Sun Haiyan, a former Vice Minister of the ILD, once served as China’s Ambassador to Singapore. In 1990, she entered the Peking University Law School, joining the Party during her mandatory military training period, having a clean political background check. This time node is highly critical—after the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989, the national security and intelligence systems began large-scale recruitment of students who entered prestigious universities that year, with selection criteria requiring a clean background and political reliability. Sun Haiyan was among those recruited from those cohorts, very likely entering the intelligence system during her university years.
After graduating with her bachelor’s degree in 1995, she went to Japan on a government sponsorship to pursue a master’s degree in law. In that era, people who could secure government sponsorship to go abroad either had exceptionally strong family backgrounds or had already established a relationship with a particular system. Returning to China in 1997, she directly entered the ILD, with her first post being in the Policy Research Office. The Research Office is the core of intelligence analysis within the ILD; externally it can use the title of “scholars,” but in reality, it produces strategic intelligence reports for top-level reading. She rose through the ranks here to become Deputy Director, and was subsequently transferred to serve as Deputy Director-General and then Director-General of the First Bureau of the ILD.
The First Bureau of the ILD is responsible for party movements in South and Southeast Asia—meaning it is the overall management department for organizations like the Communist Party of Malaya, the Communist Party of Thailand, and the Communist Party of Burma. In other words, Sun Haiyan started from intelligence analysis and ultimately became the concrete head of intelligence operations. Her later appointment as Ambassador to Singapore was to add a layer of packaging to her resume—officials at or above the vice-ministerial level require public resumes. If a resume is entirely composed of various bureaus and offices of the ILD, it appears too conspicuous; attaching a stint as an ambassador makes her appear externally as someone from the foreign affairs system.
This kind of packaging is not Sun Haiyan’s practice alone, but a conventional practice across the entire system.
Contrasting with Sun Haiyan is Liu Jianchao.He emerged from the authentic Ministry of Foreign Affairs system and was later transferred to the ILD to serve as Minister. He visited the United States in a high-profile manner and met with Antony Blinken, performing duties meant for a Foreign Minister in his capacity as ILD Minister, which constituted a severe overstepping of boundaries within the ILD. Diplomacy is a matter above the table, whereas the ILD handles matters below the table; the logic of the two systems is completely different. Liu Jianchao failed to comprehend this distinction, or rather, he simply did not care, because his goal was to succeed Wang Yi as the Director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission, and the ILD was merely a stepping stone. This was the root cause of his subsequent downfall.
An intelligence official recruited since university days who grew within the system for thirty years, and a foreign affairs system official parachuted in just to pass through—living under the roof of the same institution, they inhabited completely different worlds. This contrast, in and of itself, explains what the ILD is.
In 1971, the ILD established an internal research group, which later expanded into the Research Office. Externally, staff could hold titles like professors and scholars, but in reality, it served as an analysis center for strategic and political party intelligence. By the 1990s, some outputs of the Research Office began to be distributed externally, which is the still-existing Contemporary World magazine. This is merely the tip of the iceberg; what lies beneath the surface has never been disclosed to the public.
Between 2003 and 2004, the ILD underwent a large-scale restructuring. This restructuring was not a change of personnel, but a shift in function. The focus of its work began to pivot from political party exchanges and intelligence analysis toward intelligence collection and even intelligence operations. In coordination with the “Grand External Propaganda Project” launched at that time, the ILD began systematically intervening in foreign parliamentary political parties, nurturing minor parties, embedding personnel, and interfering in elections. The development that the Germans took twenty years to realize began precisely during this phase.
Within the internal logic of the ILD, the organizations and personnel it nurtures are all pawns. When a pawn is useful, it is given money, guns, and advisors. When a pawn is no longer useful, a phone call is placed to terminate aid, followed by a pretense of never having known them. The young Chinese charging in tears through the jungles of northern Burma, the ethnic Chinese guerrillas who fought for forty years in the Malaysian jungles, the Chinese advisors in Jordanian prisons, and the exiled Japanese Red Army in the Middle Eastern deserts—they all believed they were fighting for some ideal. They did not know that in a certain office in Beijing, someone could decide their fate at any moment, as easily as discarding a used pawn.
This series aims to clarify the stories behind this hand, piece by piece.
Editor: Li Jing Proofreader: Zhou Min Translator: Shen Meihua
Visiting Li Xiaosheng, a Petitioner Detained in a Mental Hospital for Three Years, I Was Instead Gang-Beaten
Author: Lu Jianrong
Abstract: A true record of persecution suffered under the Communist Party, exposing the anti-human nature of the Communist Party.
In Huangtan Village, Taixing, Jiangsu, Xiaosheng defended his rights but ultimately fell into disaster. Surrounded by tigers and wolves with poisonous, treacherous schemes, he was locked in a mental hospital for three years. Released only because his mother passed away, they sought to detain him again before the funeral even concluded. Hawks, hounds, claws, and fangs followed closely at his heels, gang-beating Jianrong to prevent outside aid. With a slap to the face, punches, and kicks, the demobilized soldier displayed his tyrannical abuse. Calling the police resulted only in the caller being detained, and the public security Bureau has refused to file a case for four years. Time after time, reports were falsely resolved, and all channels for the voice of the people completely spun in a void.
Li Xiaosheng, a petitioner from Yintan Village, Huangqiao Town, Taixing City, Jiangsu Province, was illegally detained under the guise of mental illness for three years. On September 13, 2022, I learned that Li Xiaosheng’s mother had passed away and that Li Xiaosheng was permitted to return home to arrange the funeral. As a former close friend, I also went to the home of Li Xiaosheng’s younger sister, located on the west side of Xiaoyinjia Bridge in Huangqiao Town, to attend the mourning ceremony and, in the process, understand Li Xiaosheng’s current situation.
When I first began to converse with Li Xiaosheng, he said he did not recognize me. Later, I stood up to go outside and asked him to walk with me out into the courtyard. He said there were people outside. I replied that even if there were people, they could not restrict his right to move about freely, and asked how he would know without going out to take a walk. Thus, we walked together to the road outside the courtyard and spoke a few words. Shortly afterward, a middle-aged woman around 60 years old approached and asked who I was (it was later verified that this person was Huang Lanzhen, the former Party Secretary of Huangtan Village). She immediately called over four or five people, claiming I was there to take Li Xiaosheng away, and stated they needed to watch me and not let me leave. She also made a phone call to their leader.
These three to five people began to verbally provoke and insult me. Because there was absolutely no reasoning with such people, I merely said one word, “ignorant,” and they claimed I was cursing them. Later, their leader arrived (it was later verified that this person was Huang Zhengguo, a villager from Household No. 6, Group 20 of Huangtan Village). He rushed over and immediately slapped me across the face. Then, five or six people rained punches and kicks upon me; some grabbed my hair, some struck me with fists, and others kicked me, beating me to the ground. While they were beating me, they even said, “How can he be so incapable of taking a beating?”
The beating drew a crowd of onlookers, so they dragged me to a less populated spot. Li Xiaosheng’s eldest younger sister saw me being gang-beaten but did not step forward to stop it; instead, she pulled Li Xiaosheng into the house. This was also because her courage had been completely broken by their usual wickedness. Although this gang-beating did not cause extreme injury to our physical bodies, the insult to my dignity and the psychological damage were immense. Some people at the scene condemned the savage behavior of Huang Zhengguo and his gang, but they could not halt their arrogant aura. Consequently, I called the police. Seeing me call the police, they said making the call was just fine, as if the police were in league with them. After a while, the 110 emergency police arrived. After briefly assessing the situation, an officer grabbed my clothes, seemingly terrified that I might run away, and told me to get into the police cruiser to go to the police station for processing. I raised an objection to the responding officers at the time: Why are you only taking me away while the people who beat me are not being taken? The responding officers evasively claimed that those individuals would drive themselves there. I asked why they were allowed to drive themselves while I was not allowed to drive myself? Later, I was forcibly shoved into the vehicle by the responding officers. Inside the car, they attempted to confiscate my mobile phone. Feeling that the Huangqiao Police Station had impure motives, and even though there was nothing on the phone, I snapped the phone in half.
At the police station, I was locked inside an interrogation room until 12:00 midnight before being released. From beginning to end, I never saw that gang of individuals who carried out the illegal surveillance and beating appear at the police station.
Because I had no phone and no spare change, the personnel from the police station drove me back to the scene of the incident to retrieve my vehicle.I had anticipated beforehand that in such a savage place, they might sabotage the car I left nearby. Upon arriving at the scene, I checked and found that, as expected, the two front tires had been deflated by them. With the assistance of the accompanying police officer, after tossing about for over an hour, a car repair vehicle was called, costing 150 yuan to inflate the tires before I could return home. After numerous uninterrupted online petitions and offline complaints to the Public Security Bureau, a response from the Huangqiao Police Station finally arrived, asking me to cooperate with the police investigation and submit relevant evidence. Because there was no video or photographic material at the time, the evidence collection phase was relatively difficult; the only avenue for gathering evidence was to visit nearby residents.
During the visits, although the nearby residents had all heard or seen the gang-beating incident occur at the time, without exception, none dared to bear witness, including Li Xiaosheng’s three younger sisters. During these visits, I also heard reflections from nearby residents that after the police station took me away that day, those people intended to send Li Xiaosheng back to the mental hospital. At that moment, nearby residents began to resist; someone picked up a mobile phone to take photos and shouted loudly, “Can it be that there is no one left in our Yintan Village?” Then other villagers responded one after another. Finally, the current Village Party Secretary also joined the ranks of opposition, ultimately driving away the people who had come to take Li Xiaosheng. The residents who were visited sighed one after another, noting that if Li Xiaosheng had been taken away at that time, it would have been completely impossible for him to survive to this day!
For four years, I have continuously reported the matter of my being gang-beaten to the relevant departments, but the case has never been formally filed or processed, and multiple complaints have failed to yield a convincing result.
For ordinary citizens, when legally reporting to the police, legally filing complaints, and legally reporting problems all fail to obtain a just response, what people worry about most is not merely the outcome of a single case’s handling, but whether the fairness and public credibility that the law ought to possess can truly be maintained.
Editor: Li Jing Proofreader: Zhou Min Translator: Shen Meihua
Understanding Environmental Determinism from Li Si’s Granary Rats
Author: Gailu Lumeng (Probability Deer Dream)
Abstract: Reflecting on the survival dilemma faced by today’s Chinese people under the tyranny of the Communist Party from a historical story.
There was an event during the Republic of China era that many people today would find counterintuitive upon hearing it.
Workers in Shanghai and rickshaw pullers in Beijing could, on the contrary, afford to eat meat several times a week. Yet landlords in Guanzhong who owned land in their hometowns usually ate very poorly, only getting to eat a bit of meat during the Chinese New Year, and they could not even afford to eat oil-splashed noodles every day in their ordinary lives.
The American scholar David Strand, in his book Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s, wrote about a specific detail.
A landlord’s wife who had fled from Hebei to Beijing as a refugee was living in a small courtyard in the West City district. One day, she lifted the pot lid at the home of her neighbor, a rickshaw puller, and saw white flour mantou (steamed buns), stir-fried eggs with garlic chives, and cold tossed cucumbers drizzled with minced garlic and sesame oil. She froze on the spot. Because in her original perception, her family owned two hundred mu of land, and logically speaking, she should have lived more decently than someone like this who did not even own a single ridge of land. Yet the reality was exactly the opposite. Her family ate coarse grains mixed into their diet all year round, while the counterpart could frequently eat white flour.
The book also mentioned that rickshaw pullers in Beijing could see meat at least a few times a week. It was not necessarily major dishes of fish or meat; it might just be offal, or perhaps just a few slices of meat, but at least they were not going without the taste of meat for long periods. Looking conversely at many landlords in the “Four Mountain-and-River Provinces” (Shanxi, Shandong, Henan, and Hebei), truly eating meat often required waiting until the year-end festivals, and normally they could not even bring themselves to eat white flour without restraint.
During the Republic of China era, there was no cold chain in the modern sense, no mature warehousing system, and no logistics network like today’s that can distribute goods and materials to the entire country with high efficiency. In large cities like Beijing and Shanghai, resources naturally converged, transactions were denser, and circulation was faster; even if it was just the resources leaking from the cracks of the city, it was enough for the people at the bottom to get a share of the grease.
However, in the Central Plains and Guanzhong, even if you were a landlord, you were merely guarding the land. That land could produce staple grains, but that did not mean it could automatically turn into an abundance of non-staple foods. The local area lacked a sufficiently developed exchange network and did not have such strong commodity supplies. Landlords would not easily use good land to raise pigs and chickens on a large scale either; at most, they would raise a few free-range ones just to fit the festive atmosphere of the Chinese New Year. The result was that while on paper they had land, output, and status, in reality, they ate poorly.
Therefore, many people’s imagination of old China is wrong. They always assume that landlords must have eaten fine grains at every meal, while urban coolies must have suffered from starvation.
Why did this phenomenon occur?
Although landlords in the Central Plains region had land in their hands, the social structure, circulation efficiency, and degree of material abundance in which they were situated were simply not on the same level. What he possessed was a local advantage, not a systemic advantage. Once a local advantage leaves the support of the macro-environment, its value will rapidly shrink.
Large cities possess a wealth spillover effect. To give a modern example: Hong Kong. Do not look at how expensive housing prices are in Hong Kong; because incomes in Hong Kong are very high, their purchasing power is strong. When they come to the Mainland to travel, buy Mainland commodities, and purchase Mainland services, it conversely feels like an especially high value for money. If 200 yuan is placed in a small county seat in Shandong, it might be extremely valuable, enough to eat from a Shandong country market for a week. But in Hong Kong, it is just a single dinner.
By the same token, for those Beijing natives, selling a single house is equivalent to what we Jinan people struggle for a lifetime to achieve. This is also where the true brilliance of Li Si’s line about the granary rats and toilet rats lies.
More than two thousand years ago, when Li Si saw the rats in the toilet and the rats in the granary, he suddenly understood this truth. A rat was still that same rat, yet the difference was ridiculously vast. Those living in the toilet ate only filth, never filling their bellies day after day while remaining on tenterhooks, scurrying about whenever they saw humans and dogs. Those living in the granary ate accumulated grain, hid beneath great roofs, experiencing no disturbances, no hunger, and no cold. Thereupon, Li Si said: “Whether a person is worthy or unworthy is just like these rats; it simply depends on where one chooses to place oneself.”
Many people have heard this sentence, and it directly punctures a reality: the massive gap between people often does not start widening from capability, but starts widening from environment. If you stand by the side of a toilet, no matter how clever you are, you must first worry about staying alive. If you stay inside a granary, even if your skills are not earth-shatteringly great, it is much easier to live decently.
When the platform is different, the world you see is different, and the resources you can be allocated are also different. Your assumption that a landlord must live better than a rickshaw puller precisely shows that you underestimate the shaping of humans by the environment, and also overestimate the value of the three words “the propertied class.”
Therefore, the first major thing Li Si did later on was not to practice his capabilities painstakingly, nor to stay put and build up seniority, but to change locations. He left the State of Chu and went to the State of Qin. He knew that if he continued to stay in his original environment, the ceiling had already been written long ago. What a person fears most is not suffering at the moment, but truly mistaking the low ground for fate, treating a dilemma as a matter of course, and mistaking those depletions for growth.
When reading history, many people always like to marvel at the talent of winners. Li Si had talent, and there is no question about that, but the step that truly allowed him to turn his life around was first understanding the environment. This judgment is more important than many instances of so-called hard work. If the direction is wrong, diligence will only send a person into a dead end faster, causing them to run into a brick wall. If the position is not good enough, capability will be compressed into a mere survival tool and cannot grow into capital at all. When resources are thin, opportunities are scarce, and rules are bad, no matter how tough a person is, it is very difficult to pull oneself out of the mud.
Poverty is not merely the amount of wealth one possesses; poverty is, first and foremost, a situation of resource scarcity. When you are in a place where resources are thin, where there is no high-quality information, no mature division of labor, no stable credit, and no sufficiently large market around you, even if you are more diligent than others, you can only splash around in a small pond. The ceiling you see is, in all probability, not the upper limit of your capability, but rather the upper limit that the environment has sealed off in advance.
In the final analysis, there are three layers to poverty.
The first layer is the shallowest, called lacking money. Everyone can see this.
The second layer runs deeper, called lacking resources. You want to get something done, but you cannot find people to cooperate with, cannot find channels, cannot find information, and cannot find a larger plate.
The third layer is the most fatal, called staying in the wrong environment without realizing it. Many people are trapped in this third layer for their entire lives. They work very hard, can endure hardships, and are willing to tolerate things, but they never leave that environment which continuously depletes them. In the end, their capabilities are not magnified, and their time is wasted.
This is also why for some people, once they switch to a different city, their destiny begins to loosen up. For some people, once they change industries, their income structure changes immediately. For some people, once they enter a higher-level platform, the skills that were originally worthless suddenly become valuable. To outsiders, it looks like a counterattack against all odds, but in reality, it is not that mysterious—it is nothing more than moving from being a toilet rat to sitting beside a granary rat. The person is still that same person, yet the energy is completely different. Because the platform will price your capability, the environment will settle the accounts for your hard work, and the system will determine how much return a single unit of your effort can bring back.
The biggest problem for many poor people does not lie in their lack of hard work, but in the fact that their understanding of poverty is overly moralized. They always feel that being poor is because they themselves are not driven enough, not ruthless enough, and not resilient enough to endure. Consequently, they desperately polish themselves, grit their teeth to endure, and force themselves to continue adapting to a rotten environment. In the end, they discover that they are getting tireder and tireder, while their situation sees no change. The reason is simple: when you apply pressure on yourself in the wrong place, it will only cause the system to drain you more efficiently, which aligns with the common saying: the more capable you are at doing work, the more work you will get to do. When a person stays in a low-potential-energy environment for a long time, even suffering will be rationalized; he will mistake a place he should have escaped from for a place of spiritual cultivation.
Sayings like “when Heaven is about to place a great responsibility on a person…” or “everything is the best arrangement”—these are all just rationalizing suffering, comforting oneself, and then continuing to accept the whipping of life.
This is precisely where Li Si was brilliant. He did not sing praises of hardships, nor did he beautify his background. He took one look at the rats and understood the problem that many people fail to figure out in a lifetime. When you live inside a well, you will inevitably believe that the world is only that big.
Of course, the importance of environment does not mean capability is useless. Capability remains important, but its utilization requires a prerequisite. You must at least first enter a place that gives capability an opportunity to accumulate, an opportunity to be exchanged, and an opportunity to add value. Otherwise, capability will degenerate into cheap labor, insight will degenerate into survival experience, and cleverness will only be enough to evade risks.
Many people like to talk about changing one’s destiny against Heaven’s will, which sounds passionate. Yet the changes in destiny for the vast majority of ordinary people are not that dramatic, nor are they that legendary. The truly effective step is usually very simple, which is to first leave that place which makes you poorer the longer you stay. Leave a set of bad rules, leave a low-density market, leave a group of people who only pull you to the left, and leave a system that seems to allow you to survive but makes it very difficult to accumulate. This action is often far more important than burying one’s head in hard work.
Therefore, what Li Si saw through two thousand years ago was the underlying structure of poverty. Being poor is not just having a few less coins in your pocket. Being poor means there is no granary by your side, no roof over your head, and no system behind your back.
Many people spend their entire lives proving that they can endure hardships. In reality, what is truly important is to not always stay in a place where you can only endure hardships.
Editor: Li Jing Proofreader: Zhou Min Translator: Ge Bing
Liquidating the Century of Tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party, Welcoming Back the Dignity and Freedom Belonging to the People
Author: Liu Leyuan
On the eve of the approaching so-called “July 1st Party Founding Day,” we should not sing praises along with the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda machine, but should instead open a historical ledger spanning a century to seriously liquidate the profound disasters this totalitarian party has brought upon the Chinese nation, the Chinese people, and countless families.
The history of the Chinese Communist Party has never been a history of the so-called “liberation of the people,” but is a history of blood and tears characterized by seizing power through lies, governing the country through violence, and enslaving the people through fear. From the violent struggles during the Land Reform to the rectification of intellectuals in the Anti-Rightist Movement; from the Great Famine caused by the Great Leap Forward to the destruction of human nature, family, culture, and faith during the Cultural Revolution; from the crushing of tanks on Tiananmen Square during “June Fourth” to the continuous persecution of Falun Gong, house churches, human rights lawyers, dissidents, and ordinary petitioning citizens, China under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party is filled with countless covered-up aggrieved souls and suffering.
What is even more lamentable is that those former Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) officers and soldiers who revolted, surrendered, or were reorganized back then also failed to meet a good end. Many former Nationalist officers and soldiers were incorporated into units after reorganization, having almost no choice under the political and military systems of the time but to participate in the Korean War, and paid the price of their lives on the battlefield; some survivors experienced subsequent political movements and investigations after the war ended, while a portion of the Nationalist soldiers on the Korean battlefield who chose to return to Mainland China after surrendering were also treated as traitors by the Chinese Communist Party. History has proven that the so-called “let bygones be bygones” was nothing but an empty promise, leaving behind only the repeated exploitation of people and political liquidations.
The most terrifying aspect of this regime is not only that it creates disasters, but more so that it does not allow the people to remember the disasters; it is not only that it harms the people, but more so that it forces the people to thank the harmer. It uses textbooks to falsify history, media to block the truth, surveillance and police to suppress voices, and fear to make people silent. An ancient nation possessing five thousand years of civilization has been forcibly locked by it inside the spiritual cage of a one-party dictatorship.
The Reform and Opening Up once mistakenly led many people to believe that China would gradually move toward openness and the rule of law, but in recent years, control over speech has been continuously tightened, social control has persistently constricted, and personal freedom has been further restricted; the totalitarian system has not only failed to exit the stage of history, but is instead continuously reinforcing itself in new forms.
In today’s China, the superficial prosperity is rapidly collapsing. The youth are unemployed, the middle-aged are debt-ridden, and the elderly are left without support in their old age; real estate projects are left unfinished, private enterprises are withering away, and the lifelong savings of ordinary families are being hollowed out. Following the depletion of local government finances, various fines, fees, and extortions are emerging one after another. The so-called “serving the people” has long since turned into the ruling elite’s extraction of the very last bit of the people’s blood and sweat.
What enrages people even more is that when the people suffer injustice, the system does not protect the victims, but instead protects the perpetrators. Farmers lose their land with no one looking after them, workers face suppression when demanding their back pay, petitioners are intercepted, believers are monitored, and people who dare to speak the truth are threatened, detained, or even sentenced. Under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, the law is not a shield to protect the people, but a tool to suppress them.
The reason I stand up to voice my opinion is because I know full well that in a country without freedom of speech, without freedom of belief, and without judicial independence, ordinary people can become the next victim at any moment. Today, those being persecuted are others; tomorrow, it could be oneself. Silence cannot trade for safety, and backing down cannot trade for freedom. Only when more and more people stand up to expose the truth will cracks appear in the high walls of totalitarianism.
We raise our voices overseas not for hatred, but for justice; not to create antagonism, but to ensure that historical truth is no longer buried. We want to tell the world: the Chinese Communist Party does not equal China, and the Chinese Communist Party certainly does not represent the Chinese people. The true China consists of those who still hold fast to their conscience amidst suffering, those who refuse to bow their heads to lies, and the ordinary folks who long for freedom, dignity, and the right to faith.
The century of tyranny must be liquidated; the century of lies must be exposed; the century of blood debts must be judged by history. The Chinese Communist Party started its journey by relying on lies, maintains itself by relying on violence, and rules by relying on fear, but no dictatorial regime can stand over the heads of the people forever. No matter how thick the high walls are, they cannot block the awakening of the people’s hearts; no matter how long the dark night is, it will ultimately welcome the dawn.
We believe that the day truly belonging to the Chinese people will eventually arrive. On that day, the people will no longer fear because of speaking the truth, will no longer be persecuted because of their faith, and will no longer be threatened because of pursuing justice. On that day, China will shake off the shadow of the one-party dictatorship and welcome back the dignity, freedom, and light belonging to the people.
Editor: Huang Jizhou Proofreader: Cheng Xiaoxiao Translator: Ge Bing
Lobga Rangzen’s Last Words Before Self-Immolation—The Responsibility and Unity of Tibet
Author: Lobga Rangzen
Chinese Translation and Compilation: Chinese Youth Supporting Tibet Association
Before his action, the self-immolator Lobga Rangzen left a testament in his own garage and published it on his Facebook page. Rangzen is a name he chose for himself, which means “independence” and “freedom” in Tibetan.
The following is the compiled content of his testament (transcribed from audio translation): Any activity we organize abroad is to protest the Chinese Communist Party’s high-pressure policies inside Tibet and to resist China’s rule over Tibet and the Tibetan people. Today, I want to say a few words. To the Tibetans inside Tibet, I have nothing more to say, because they have always been risking their lives, with the greatest courage, making continuous efforts to save Tibet’s language, culture, and dignity. Therefore, I am not qualified to say anything more to them. Today, I mainly want to say four points to the exiled Tibetans:
First, exiled Tibetans must not forget their responsibility. In exile, we enjoy a life of freedom and democracy. This kind of freedom and democracy was given to us by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. His Holiness allowed us to have freedom, not for us to exhaust ourselves through internal friction, nor for us to fight against each other internally under the name of democracy and freedom. Every single one of us should speak out for the freedom of Tibet and find ways for the future of Tibet. His Holiness the Dalai Lama once said that Tibetans living abroad should not feel satisfied just because they have a house and a car, because Tibetans inside Tibet are still living in suffering.
Second, we must understand that the suffering of Tibetans is because we lost our own country. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is a global teacher of peace; he travels for the peace and happiness of all sentient beings, so he does not speak too forcefully or harshly. But we ourselves must understand: Why do Tibetans inside Tibet have no freedom at all? Why is our nation facing a crisis of being eradicated? Why do we not even have the right to revere and display the portrait of His Holiness the Dalai Lama? This is all because we lost our own country and lost our own freedom. Many people say we do not have a country; that is not true—we have a country, it is just that our country has been occupied by China.
Third, exiled Tibetans must stop dividing themselves by regions or sects, and instead truly unite. When the Chinese Communist Party suppresses Tibetans, it does not differentiate whether you are Khampa, Amdo, or U-Tsang, nor does it differentiate which sect you belong to. They suppress all Tibetans equally, and they destroy all religions equally. Therefore, we Tibetans abroad really should no longer differentiate among Khampa, Amdo, and U-Tsang, nor should we divide ourselves by various sects. Every single one of us should unite and make greater efforts to restore the freedom of Tibetans and for the independence of the Tibetan nation.
Fourth, do not stop doing what ought to be done because of my action; true mourning means continuing to struggle for Tibet. If this time I am to undertake a major action, a sensational action, I press my palms together and beg everyone: do not stop what we are currently doing because of this matter. What we are doing now is to preserve our own language and culture. Therefore, those who should dance must still dance, and those who should sing must still sing. Because all of these are for the purpose of enabling the younger generation of Tibetans to accept and inherit their own language and culture. Especially now, we are about to welcome the 91st birthday of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I hope that Tibetans all over the world will grandly hold birthday celebrations for His Holiness. All of these are extremely important. We must not remain frozen only in sorrow or moments of silence just because of one person’s action.
What we truly need to feel sorrow for, and what truly requires a moment of silence, is that we have lost our own country. Every single one of us should launch greater actions for this cause. My undertaking of this action today is not because I lack food, clothing, housing, or transportation, not because I have nothing to eat, nothing to wear, or nowhere to live, and it is not for my personal livelihood issues either. All of this is for the independence of Tibet, and for the resistance of Tibet. Therefore, I press my palms together and beg everyone: if you truly want to mourn me, please act according to the wishes I have stated here. I hope everyone will continue to work hard and continue to struggle for the cause of Tibet. Finally, I want to say: Long live the independence of the Tibetan nation! Bhö Gyalo (Victory to Tibet)!!!!
Editor: Huang Jizhou Proofreader: Cheng Xiaoxiao Translator: Ge Bing
