The Orwellian Dragon

When it comes to covering up the truth and peddling propaganda, nobody is as proficient as a communist government. For the past century, various communist dictatorships around the world taught us a masterclass in propaganda, deception, and historical denialism. People of Eastern Europe still remember the Katyn massacre, the Holodomor, Chernobyl disaster, and other Soviet blunders that were quickly swept under the rug. While the communists are useless at pretty much everything else, their skills when it comes to burying both truth and people are without equal. By now the endless propaganda, genocide, and economic collapse are a well-known pattern in communist nations. However, many in the West remain ignorant or wilfully blind to this modus operandi of the heroes of the proletariat. Especially when it comes to the one nation that has managed to come closest to its fabled ideal of the Orwellian nightmare. The Peoples Republic of China.

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Revolutionary Way to Die: A Brief History of Communist China

Before getting to the contemporary ways the Communist Party of China uses to spread lies and disease, it might be a worthwhile thing to take a step back and recap some of their admirable efforts to turn one of the most fascinating countries in the world into a nightmarish, totalitarian hellscape. In 1949, after becoming the sole ruling force of the mainland China, the CPC could begin assuming total control of life in the country and rolling out its revolutionary ideas on a massive scale. First on the menu was the traditional “purge” of intellectuals, capitalists, and anyone who dared to express something vaguely reminiscent of criticism of the communist rule. Apart from the widespread prosecution of “class enemies”, the first great accomplishment of the CPC was the Great Leap Forward. A leap so great that up to the estimated 45 million people failed to make it to the other side. For comparison, this great reform had about the same death toll as the Second World War. Mao Zedong put all the other tyrants in history to shame.

The Great Leap was at its core very similar to other successful communist campaigns in both methods and results. After seizing what little property the peasants had, the state introduced a series of goals, usually in the form of a 5-year plan, enforced through the good old terror. Because nobody wanted to end up being branded a counter-revolutionary and meeting the business end of a firing squad, every single official lied about the fulfilment of the quotas. The result was that nobody knew what the real production numbers were and the agricultural output was plummeting. The officials of course declared that the 5-year plan was ahead of schedule and the communist utopia is nearly achieved. Since at this point of the revolution people were starving anyway, Mao decreed that every commune should build a backyard furnace to produce quality steel for the needs of the state. In order to meet the demands of the party, peasants were requisitioned to provide every piece of scrap metal, including pans and ploughs, and burn it with any available wood, which was more often than not their doors and furniture. The result was a staggeringly massive increase in production of a completely worthless heap of pig iron that was subsequently thrown away and of course the traditional bi-product of mass starvation.

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Because the slack-jawed elite of the Communist Party is really only capable of reading worthless pamphlets from washed up, bearded, German pseudo-intellectuals, the actual experts in the field of governance tend to experience a very sudden and acute case of death immediately after a communist revolution. The result is that their posts are taken over by murderous ideologues who have bigger concerns than the tiresome issue of human suffering. The case of backyard furnaces is only one of many examples of the moronic experiments of the CPC, which resulted in millions having to starve to death. Be it by accident or evil design.

Now that millions were killed by famine and incompetence, it was time to continue the Cultural Revolution. That is, killing a couple dozen million people more through massacres, ethnic cleansing, and persecution. In their pursuit of complete control over the nation, the CPC started demolishing the historic artefacts and cultural sites in order to build a Maoist cult of personality upon their ashes. People identified as threats to the regime were placed into the Five Black Categories and either eradicated or re-educated through beatings, humiliation, and imprisonment. The only way to make people comply with the lamentable conditions brought in by the CPC was to install a reign of terror on an unprecedented scale. China became a terrifying example of what happens when a country gets overtaken by people possessed by ideology. People who do not care about the cost as long as there is a chance of achieving their dreamed-up utopia. That is why the only substantial product of this “great leap” was the greatest famine in modern history and the transformation of China into the largest prison camp in the world.

Two Plus Two Equals Winnie the Pooh: China and the Covid Crisis

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The latest crisis that stole all the headlines, the COVID-19 pandemic, is yet another example of the catastrophic effect a totalitarian communist government of this scale can have on the world. Chinese government’s handling of the epidemic outbreak was reminiscent of all the other times a communist government screwed up. The primary goal was to cover up any responsibility. During the first weeks of the outbreak, there were a number of warnings from the doctors in Wuhan about the imminent threat and the need to act. Recent reports have shown that the Chinese president Xi Jinping knew of the severity of the outbreak for a week before deciding to inform the people. That comes on top of the two weeks during which the cases have been appearing and the officials refused to report them higher out of fear. Instead of addressing the issue, the Communist Party acted quickly to silence all health officials, disappear journalists, and reprimand anyone who informed the public. Dr. Li Wenliang was taken by government authorities and forced to denounce his statement warning of the outbreak. He later died of Coronavirus and became a symbol of the government oppression and further proof that the CPC cares more about maintaining control than about the lives of the Chinese people.

Recently, China has tightened its grip on academic research into the origins of the virus. On top of the already rather fictional statistics provided by the Chinese government, all scientific papers that seek to be published will now have to undergo a strict censorship by the State Council. The uncensored research that came out in January undercut the official party line parroted by the WHO that there is no chance of human-to-human transmission. Censoring academic research and pushing propaganda instead of empirical evidence is yet another step by the CPC to help them control the narrative and push its own “politically correct” version of reality. One of the government’s attempts to shift the attention from their utter failure to handle the pandemic was pushing a conspiracy that the virus was a US attack on China.

Despite the constant breaches of international law, oppression, and outright genocide of its own population, China still enjoys a prominent position on the international stage. Not only that, there are many officials in the West who help promulgate the party line and deny the crimes of the CPC. The Coronavirus crisis has shown how morally corrupt some prominent figures in the WHO really are. From the beginning of the outbreak China blocked WHO experts from getting into the country and examining the situation. In spite of that, the WHO kept uncritically pushing the uncorroborated claims put forth by the CPC. They ignored the warnings of Taiwanese experts and refused to admit a need for concern. Instead, the WHO chose to take the dubious numbers provided by the Chinese government at face value and thus threw shadow of doubt on any existing predictions.

Some have already started to catch on to the dangers of collaborating with a lying, tyrannical regime. A number of US companies have decided to move their production out of china following the trade war and the fallout from the pandemic. UK and US intelligence services have been bringing information about the vast discrepancy between Beijing’s numbers and actual reality, which will likely affect further diplomatic relations. Japan has unveiled a 2.2 billion dollar stimulus aimed at removing Japanese companies from China. Notwithstanding the official CPC claims that the country has managed to handle the outbreak, nobody knows what is really going on in China right now. The Potemkin villages constructed for a quick show to the outside analysts were hardly indicative of the situation in the country and the governmental censure will unlikely reveal any negative realities. Peoples Republic of China is a threat that Orwell warned us about and the current crisis is only one of many, which we should never forget.

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