Millions of Chinese Citizens Demand End of Communist Rule – Media Blackout

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Millions of Chinese citizens demand end of Communist Party rule

Millions of Chinese citizens are taking to the streets in various cities across China demanding an immediate end to Communist rule.

Citizens across the country were angry by the CCP’s COVID restrictions, which had prevented firefighters from reaching the scene of a fire at an apartment block in in Urumqi. “This is people past their breaking point,” tweeted CNN’s Selina Wang on Sunday.

Gatestoneinstitute.org reports: Also on Sunday, the Telegraph‘s Simina Mistreanu reported on Twitter that a crowd numbering at least 100 began marching toward Tiananmen Square, in the heart of the Chinese capital. Police, however, stopped demonstrators after only a few blocks, at the Liangma River. “The fact that they intended to protest at Tiananmen,” she wrote, “is wild.”

Mistreanu is right. Observers say the weekend disturbances — China was quiet on Monday — are the most significant since mass demonstrations rocked the Chinese capital and some 370 other cities in the Beijing Spring of 1989. In many respects, however, the ongoing protests are more dangerous to China’s Communist Party.

As Charles Burton, a China scholar at the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute, told Gatestone, even the 1989 Tiananmen Movement “did not challenge the fundamentals of Party rule over China.” Protestors then only wanted hardliners like Premier Li Peng removed to make way for “democratic reforms;” in other words, “Party-mediated democratization of China,” as Burton termed it.

Today, however, many Chinese want to get rid of the Party. As Mistreanu reported, the demonstrators she witnessed in Beijing were chanting “We want freedom, equality, democracy, rule of law.” “We don’t want dictatorship,” they shouted.

The weekend’s demonstrations also resemble the protests in 1949. That year, Mao Zedong defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s ruling Nationalists. Then, Chiang commanded far superior armies than the Communists, but his regime nonetheless quickly fell.

Why did that happen? Chiang’s Nationalists had, the acclaimed China historian Yu Ying-shih once told me, “lost people’s hearts.” The CCP, as the Chinese Communist Party is informally known, has now lost hearts across the country.

China, throughout the Communist period, has witnessed demonstrations, but most of them are, as Burton noted, “highly localized” and “directed at malfeasance, corruption, and incompetence of lower level Communist functionaries.”

Now, however, the anger is directed at the Party itself. In short, as evident from the spontaneous demonstrations of the weekend, the Chinese people have had enough of Xi Jinping and CCP rule. They recognize the fundamental fact that the Party’s system does not work.

Xi cemented his position over the Communist Party at last month’s 20th National Congress, but the Party is losing control of Chinese society.

The Chinese people are not only angry over Xi’s “dynamic Zero-COVID policy”; they are also troubled by a crumbling economy and the collapse of the all-important property sector. New-home prices in 70 cities, for instance, fell in October for the 14h-straight month. There have been abnormally few sales in recent months as the market is “frozen,” with big spreads between what sellers demand and what buyers are willing to pay. These drops in prices and sales are of great concern because some 70% of Chinese household wealth is tied up in property. China’s people, as a result, were not happy even before Thursday’s fatal blaze.

Popular attitudes suggest that China will remain unstable for some time. So why should the international community care about the current instability in China?

Because China’s regime might lash out.

If the Communist Party looked as if it would fall quickly, Xi could not lash out. He would have to devote all his resources at home, deploying the People’s Liberation Army internally.

If, however, the crisis plays out over a long time, Xi will have the opportunity to try to direct popular anger at neighboring countries or the United States and aim the Chinese military abroad.

The world was fortunate that the Soviet Union dissolved fast, but do not expect China to go as quickly. Xi Jinping, in a secret speech to Communist Party cadres in December 2012 — the month after he took power as Party general secretary — criticized Mikhail Gorbachev for allowing the Soviet state to fail. The Soviet leader, Xi said, was not a “real man.”

Xi, who does consider himself a “real man,” has already during his ten years as general secretary exacerbated xenophobia in China. Fomenting hatred of America, to save the Communist Party from popular unrest, would not be a big step for him.

Xi, who this weekend heard the chants demanding he step down, probably knows he cannot win back Chinese hearts short of starting a war.

That gives everyone a direct stake in what happens next on China’s streets.

7 Comments

  1. Why can’t we get together here in the USA and demand the same thing? oh, a football game is on? you mean the players that hate the flag? you want to stay home and watch them play? pass on saving your nation? the place you live? oh ok then. see you in the gulag.

    • A lot of people are under the false impression that China is a communist country . . . it is a monarchy with an elective emperor like the old Mongolian khanate. Mandarins and potentates select their emperor, the current dynasty may not be hereditary like North Korea, but they are all ethnic Chinese.

      However, don’t be fooled into thinking we get anything factual from them or from our own historians and media. Their communist party as we call it, is just a façade for the fawning rubes in the Western media.

      The vast majority of Chinese are Buddhists . . . The founder of the Yuan dynasty was Kublai Khan, who ordered all Buddhist temples in China to be led by the Shaolin Temple . . . eight princes during the Ming dynasty converted to Shaolin . . .

      China was primarily a Buddhist nation until the Mao Dynasty . . . Falun Gong is repressed because it is an offshoot of Shaolin Buddhism.

  2. Xi ccp has made China very capitalistic and the West can’t stand it. The Chinese are far too wealthy for their liking and the private wealth by land ownership is a big problem. They would have preferred him to not allow any private land ownership so its easier to consolidate one title into theirs,.

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